With the support of various personal and institutional mobile technologies, numerous physical and virtual spaces can be turned into interesting and motivating hybrid learning settings. By its nature, outdoor mobile learning happens on the move is connected to specific locations and settings inviting learners to study their surroundings, inquire about natural phenomena and solve complex real‐life problems. This poses challenges for teachers to design meaningful, contextualized and comprehensive learning experiences. The paper aims to explore what kind of mobile learning scenarios K‐12 teachers create and what are the limitations and development perspectives of these scenarios. Content analysis of 25 location‐based outdoor learning tracks with 465 questions and tasks was carried out. The results demonstrate that designing and implementing learning activities outside the safe, familiar classroom environment in new hybrid learning spaces is a challenging task for the teachers on many different levels. Taking Bloom’s revised taxonomy, types of contextualization and integrated learning models as frameworks for content analysis of the learning scenarios, the study shows that the teachers do not perceive the potential hybrid spaces and mobile technologies offer in order to design consistent learning experiences that emphasize higher order thinking levels, encompass contextual information and integrate knowledge from multiple disciplinary sources. The paper concludes that there is a need for more teacher training and systemic interventions into current teaching practices that encourage teachers to step outside of their existing teaching paradigms to acknowledge the pedagogical potential of hybrid learning spaces as well as the technological affordances.

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Zoos as comprehensive systems for sustainable use of the cultural and nature heritage and for environmental education have the foundation of a smart entity and the great potential to be turned into smart learning ecosystems. What the zoos require is the leveraging of technological solutions to make them smart. The paper presents an attempt to design and develop a web-based application for the zoos in the Central Baltic region to support zoo visitors’ engagement in learning and to provide smart learning experiences through creating and playing games in the zoos with personal mobile devices. To understand the nature and level of “smartness” of the application, a study with students was carried out. In particular, the study aimed at exploring the students’ behavioral patterns with their mobile devices while interacting with the application. The results of the study demonstrated that aiming to transform the zoos into smart learning ecosystems through the technological solution requires re-conceptualization of “smart” and identification of the most adequate factors that determine the smartness of a zoo to avoid techno-deterministic learning experiences.

Science education enhances students’ scientific literacy in order to interact with the world responsibly and contribute to democratic and informed decision-making. The emergence of place-responsive pedagogy and mobile technology with a variety of affordances has refocused attention on students’ direct embodied experience. P-responsive pedagogy combined with mobile technologies provides numerous opportunities for investigating, across contexts, everyday socio-economical environmental problems inherent to a particular location. Forming an evidence-based decision on socio-economical environmental real-life problems requires a more in depth understanding of natural processes than just making use of everyday knowledge that is based on perceptions and direct observations. Therefore, this paper aims to explore the secondary education students’ (a) awareness and understanding about a timely socio-environmental challenge, (b) development of the scientific vocabulary, (c) scaffolding needs during the mobile outdoor collaborative inquiry-based learning event. To fulfill the aims, action research with an experimental technology-enhanced collaborative inquiry learning design was created to investigate students’ knowledge gain and scaffolding needs. Three interventions with a total of 68 secondary education students (age 14–15) were conducted. Both quantitative and qualitative data were collected and analyzed. The results demonstrate the change in students’ opinions about the complex socio-economical environmental challenge and transformation from everyday concepts to more scientific knowledge, and their need for conceptual and procedural scaffolding. This paper adds new insights on how to utilize non-gamified use of mobile technology to empower secondary students’ scientific literacy and understanding in authentic settings.