Environmental Education and Ecolonization

One of the primary goals of Ecolonization is to help teachers integrate environmental education (EE) into their classrooms.

What is EE? In the most simplest terms, it is education of students to be aware of and understand the environment and its problems. It includes everything from a basic understanding of environmental, such as what a tree is, to participation towards solving environmental problems, such as pollution.

Ecolonization creates a uniquely motivating environment by embedding environmental concepts inside of a scenario (story) about space exploration and colonization of other planets. However, to be able to scaffold your students learning, you need to have some familiarity with environmental concepts.

Therefore, for those of you who may be unfamiliar with environmental concepts, this section will look at why Ecolonization was created to help teach EE and review the concepts that are central to the first lesson of Ecolonization: food chains and food webs.

Rationalization for Ecolonization's Creation

One of the primary goals of Ecolonization is to help teachers integrate environmental education (EE) into their classrooms.

Although teachers, administrators, and the public may believe that EE is important, there are a number of barriers that exist between the desire for and the implementation of EE. Amongst the many problems cited, the most common are:

But, even if all of these problems were overcome, there is a reoccurring concern expressed by environmental educations and teachers that training is needed.

One solution to this is to provide formalized training at environmental education centers. However, due to the financially tight constraints that many schools are facing, there simply isn't enough funding to support this.

Another option is to develop a way to integrate EE into classrooms without requiring formalized training. Ecolonization was designed as a prototype for an informal method of integrating EE. The teachers' website (which you are reading now) provides support through lessons, resource links, the game itself, and direct access to the program's creator. Further, the Ecolonization game is so user-friendly that it does not require training to use.

While Ecolonization provides a constructivist, or "hands-on", approach to EE, it is not intended to replace field trips where students can experience the real environment. What the game does do is provide a supplemental activity that allows students to visually interact with abstract and complex ideas to help gain deeper understanding.

Using Ecolonization, students could learn about environmental concepts in the classroom and then go outside to conduct real experiments. They would be able to draw their own parallels and connections between what happens "theoretically" in the classroom and what they see happening in the real world.

Food webs and food chains are both based off of the same general premise: organisms interact with each other in specific ways. There are numerous ways these interactions can take place. For instance, they might be in the form of predator-prey relationships where one organism eats another, or they might be in the form of competition where organisms compete for a common food source.

Some organisms can create their own food (sugars) by a using sunlight, carbon dioxide and water through a processes known as photosynthesis. These types of organisms (those who can produce their own food) are known as producers. Almost all food chains can eventually be traced back to some sort of producer such as a fan plant or phytoplankton. Phytoplankton are merely very very tiny plants which live suspended in the water.

Other organisms who eat (or consume) the producers for food are called consumers. Some organisms, called herbivores, may choose to eat only plants as food sources. A blue fish from Ecolonization would be a prime example of a herbivore.

Other organisms, like the grey fish, may eat a combination of other consumers and plants. These are called omnivores because they eat everything (omni means all).

Note that when I'm explaining these relationships, I'm using the word "organism" rather than "animal". Organism refers to all living beings (animals, plants or microbes) whereas animals can often be quite confusing to younger students. If you mention animal to young students, they will more than likely think of a picture of a mammal, or fur bearing animal, like a dog or a cat.

Animals in the scientific sense refer to a type of classification of organisms. Therefore, until students are at the grade level where they are learning about specific classifications of organisms, it is best to avoid loosely using the term "animals." Rather use the word organisms.

An organism's food chain shows its relationships to other organisms. What eats it (predators) and what it eats (prey). Below is a picture of a food chain for the blue fish. Its predator (the organism that eats it) is the grey fish. The blue fish's prey (the organism that it eats) is phytoplankton.

A food web is a drawing that shows how the food chains of different organisms are connected. For instance, the food web shown below contains the food chains of grey fish, blue fish, and phytoplankton.