A Mobile-Guided Smart-Safari on an Extracurricular Location

Associated with climate change, it is necessary to enable young people to develop adaption strategies and assess impacts on ecosystems and agriculture. This requires an education based on skills rather than pure knowledge. Particularly motivational aspects can be an impulse for future active and responsible decision-making. Thus, primary experiences and problem-oriented learning in extracurricular activities could enforce commitment and readiness for action. Working with living plants and discovering their adaption strategies towards harsh climatic conditions strives for a fundamental understanding of the evolutionary processes that have led to these strategies. This deeper understanding implies also to think about the long period of time needed for the plants to develop genetically fixed adaption methods. This paper describes the development of an action-oriented and problem-based interdisciplinary learning environment for senior grade students in a botanical garden using digital media. Along 16 interactive stations, students can discover adaption strategies of various plants towards climatic conditions with regard to their morphology or physiology. Multimedia learning materials explaining climatic factors in the polar, temperate, subtropical and tropical climatic zone are provided by a web-application, which has been designed for this particular setting. Guided by tablet PCs, the students discover limiting factors like frost, high temperature and insolation, water shortage and snow cover in the various glasshouses autonomously in partner work. Using scientific methods like observing and describing morphological characteristics, they generate hypotheses at first. The web-app offers climate diagrams, maps and information as text or video to come to a solution. Hands-on stations with experiments will help to explain physiological adaption strategies of the plants.