Plant visibility through mobile learning? Implementation and evaluation of an interactive Flower Hunt in a botanic garden

Abstract

Plants have an enormous importance for life on earth but are often overlooked. This phenomenon called plant blindness is reinforced as students prefer to spend their recreation time with modern media rather than in nature. Mobile devices have become an omnipresent part of students’ everyday lives. Nevertheless, direct experiences with plants are needed to create an empathic link. We decided to combine mobile learning with plant education in the context of an excursion. Therefore, we created an interactive treasure hunt-like quiz for mobile devices through a botanic garden as an approach to positively influence students’ knowledge about and attitude towards plants and nature. The main topic was the variety of flowers which is why we called it the flower hunt. Besides the comprehension of plant diversity, its endangerment and protection, attention was given to flower morphology and ecology as well as to systematics. Our results showed increased performances especially in systematics. Students were motivated to take part and enjoyed the implementation. Although the unit did not entirely cure plant blindness it increased students’ environmental awareness. Thus, the flower hunt provides a new educational approach for promoting conservation.

Keywords:

• Mobile learning
• plant blindness
• flower ecology
• botanic garden
• biodiversity
• conservation

Acknowledgements

We thank Actionbound for the free provision of their media pedagogical tool and the app. A great thank you to Botanischer Garten in Mainz as well as to Grüne Schule at the botanic garden and to Freundeskreis Botanischer Garten Mainz for their cooperation and financial support concerning the 15 tablet computers. Further on, a very special thanks to Joachim W. Kadereit, Regine Classen-Bockhoff and Ute Becker for their support at the development of the flower hunt.

Notes

1. Botanic gardens in Germany display about 50,000 out of 280,000 known species (according to the German association of botanic gardens http://www.verband-botanischer-gaerten.de/pages/botgaerten.html; accessed 23 November 2016)] while worldwide around 100,000 species are shown (International Agenda for Botanic Gardens in Conservation 2012).