The Biodiversity Kids website was a joint project with the UN Convention on Biological Diversity. The loss of biodiversity will affect our food supplies, wood sources, medicine and sources of energy. It will most likely reduce the productivity and stability of ecosystems, shrinking the plethora of natural processes from which we constantly draw, and weakening the capabilities to deal with natural disasters such as floods, hurricanes and human-generate crises. For this reason, one of the main concerns of the CBD has been education and public awareness. The UN-CBD specified that it was interested in an interactive and engaging environment rather than sequenced online textbook. The CSLP team designed an educational website for a challenging range of ages (6 to 14 year olds), that could function as a stand-alone website but which could also be used in a classroom setting.

The two main guiding questions were “how is biodiversity threatened across the globe?” and “what can children do in their context to help preserve biodiversity?” These themes were approached, indirectly, through three games that focus on habitat-species interdependence (Make Me A Home), evolution and diversity (Super-Animal Creator), and global threats to biodiversity (Mission: Cat Rescue). The activities were designed to be relevant to children from a wide variety of cultures and background, technical capacities and cognitive and developmental skills; a truly global audience.

Alongside the three interactive games, The website includes professional support for educators or parents with ideas for complimentary offline activities, as well as suggestions on how to use the games to explore other themes. There are Animal Profile cards, age-appropriate embedded support within the games, a variety of cognitive scaffolds and meaningful feedback.

The final product was released to the CBD server on June 30th, 2006 following a successful presentation of the website to the Conference of Parties in Brazil in March 2006.

Biodiversity website: http://kids.biodiv.org/
Integrating Scaffolds into Goal-based Scenarios: The case of an interactive game on biodiversity for children [Download paper]