Low-cost emerging technologies as a tool to support informal environmental education in children from vulnerable public schools of southern Chile

ABSTRACT

Reform to the Chilean educational system seeks to improve public education, adapting the school curriculum to new technologies and the information revolution. Our study focused on highlighting potential issues with environmental and technological education, offering opportunities to complement the current Chilean curriculum with an interdisciplinary approach. During a five-week period interspersed through the school semester, 115 underprivileged children in seventh grade from five public schools of southern Chile participated in workshops based on Arduino technology to address current environmental problems caused by global change and anthropization. Surveys were conducted to participating students and included both open and closed-ended questions, which measured attitudes and perceptions towards science and the use of technology in classrooms and daily lives. Surveys were analysed quantitatively with basic statistics and qualitatively by building semantic networks of the relationships between different concepts expressed by the students. Results did not show significant changes in attitudes towards science or technology before and after the workshops but students reported mixed feelings about science. Indifference and fear emerged, coupled with the need for more interactive experiences. Curiosity and enthusiasm also surfaced when students were using new technologies. Since the school curriculum is generally focused exclusively towards the completion of specific curricular aims, highly vulnerable schools in Chile have few opportunities to access interactive, hands-on activities. Low-cost, emergent technologies, such Arduinos, have a high potential for improving student's attitude towards science and technology and their use should be considered when tailoring school curriculum in Chile and elsewhere.

KEYWORDS:

• Arduino
• climate change
• hands-on
• information and communication technology
• project-based learning
• 21CC abilities

Acknowledgements

We thank EXPLORA-CONICYT for funding ‘Ecoinformática para Jóvenes’, Project ED190018. D. Alò acknowledges support from a CONICYT Doctoral Fellowship 21150634 and H. Samaniego a FONDECYT-CONICYT Grant #116280 during the development of this project. We acknowledge the valuable help of the following collaborators: Catalina Rodríguez, Roke Rojas, Dafne Gho-Illanes, Cristian Castillo, Boris Sotomayor, and several volunteers from Universidad Austral de Chile, such as Andrés Vera, Angélica Sandoval, Tania Gipolou, Alex Acuña, and Abdías Ponce along with all the organisers of Expotrónica 2016. This document was manually edited after being translated from Spanish with www.DeepL.com/Translator. The methodology and instruments applied, as well as the audio-visual material collected during the development of the project ‘Ecoinformática para Jóvenes’ were validated by CONICYT. All surveys were reviewed and approved by CONICYT. Audio-video-photo recording and permission to release information for the surveys were requested and obtained from parents and/or guardians of all the children involved in the project before starting the workshops.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

ORCID

Dominique Alò http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0579-4156

Andrea Castillo http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7577-0697

Paula Marín Vial http://orcid.org/0000-0001-5242-7020

Horacio Samaniego http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2485-9827

Notes

1 SIMCE - Sistema de Medición de la Calidad de la Educación

2 Investment in research and development was only 0.38% of gross domestic product (GDP) in 2010 (Ministerio de Economía del Gobierno de Chile, 2012), a very low value compared to the OCDE average of 2.5% of GDP.

3 At 3.4% of the gross domestic product, spending on primary, secondary and post-secondary educational institutions in Chile was still below OECD average in 2013 (OECD, 2017).

4 Income inequality is associated with lower education attainment and Chile has the greatest inequalities on educational attainment in the OECD (OECD, 2017).

Additional information

Funding

We thank EXPLORA-CONICYT for funding ‘Ecoinformática para Jóvenes’, Project ED190018. D. Alò acknowledges support from a Comisión Nacional de Investigación Científica y Tecnológica (CONICYT) Doctoral Fellowship No. 21150634 and H. Samaniego a Fondo Nacional de Desarrollo Científico y Tecnológico (FONDECYT-CONICYT) Grant No. 116280 during the development of this project.