Creating environmental awareness among young people

Since 2018, the Biodiv’Educ association has been organizing recreational tech workshops for youngsters aged between 6 and 18.

Created in 2018 at the initiative of the Play for Nature endowment fund, Biodiv’Educ works for the preservation of biodiversity and the environment by targeting the younger generation. Located in the Puy-de-Dôme département, the association designs its own workshops on numerous topics such as forests, ecosystems and climate change and deploys them to schools and recreational centers for a modest fee. Aware that transport is often a hindrance to school activities, Biodiv’Educ has chosen to go directly to the classes with its equipment and outings are always made as close as possible to the establishments.

To enter the world of children and facilitate their understanding of the issues, Biodiv’Educ uses new technologies, combining pedagogy and games through orientation courses, escape games, video games and various workshops. The objective is to get out of the classic confrontation between nature and technology by allowing young people to use these tools to discover nature.

With help from the Michelin Corporate Foundation, three new workshops were created and tested during the 2022-2023 school year, in Auvergne, to help children better understand and respect their natural environment:

– an escape game in wetlands to understand life in these areas

– a nature outing to observe the super senses of animals

– a workshop on the migration of animals from one environment to another – simulated by a robot

In parallel with these three newly developed and tested workshops in 2022/2023, Biodiv’Educ continued to lead the 7 existing workshops.

In total since its creation in 2018: 497 workshops have been carried out, including 204 in 2022/2023 and 9,169 children have been educated, including 3,629 in 2022/2023.

By 2027, Biodiv’Educ wishes to develop ten additional workshops and thus double the choice of workshops for teachers over the next five years.