A Geocaching Route about Sustainability

A hedgehog is being nursed back to health. The nursing station is one of the places the students visited, when they studied about sustainability.
Image by W. Radeske

Sustainability is an important topic for students to learn about.

In fact, in the 21st century, it is absolutely essential.

I am a big advocate for project-based learning. To combine these two, I let my students do a sustainability project. To plan the project, I used the existing materials about Man and Nature.

The fundamental idea was, to study the topic of sustainability from different angles. To this end, they also visited a wide range of companies and places in their local area. In each of these places, they made interviews to learn more.

The end result is a new section on this website, which you can find here. As an added bonus, the students also created a Geocaching route. They also placed a Geocache at each of the places they visited. To tell about the place, thy marked every cache with a QR code. It links to the corresponding website, that the students created.

Here are some of the places, we visited:

  • A nursing station for hedgehogs
  • Rewilded areas
  • A second-hand textile sorting facility
  • A shop, that specializes in local and regional produce
  • A permaculture farm
  • A waste sorting facility

There are many benefits to this project. For one, the students get a broader understanding of what sustainability is.
Another benefit is, that it boosts the local community. It showcases interesting projects and companies that work with the issue of sustainability in our local area.
Thirdly, the students can present their results to a broader audience through the website.



About the Materials for the Sustainability Project

Currently, all the materials and websites are in German. They will get translated.
If you want to use the idea for a project of your own, you are free to use the materials and websites for inspiration.

Here you can find the worksheets, that I used for the theory part. For the most part, they are an adaptation of the existing Man and Nature materials. But I also created some new questions for debate and reflections.

Here are the finished websites. As I said, they are currently in German. I hope I will get around to translating them soon. I also created a guide the students can use to write website articles/posts.