Urban Itineraries with Smartphones to Promote an Improvement in Environmental Awareness among Secondary School Students

Abstract

Our world is undergoing a series of changes that are taking it to an unsustainable situation. In addition to alerting the population, we must seek education towards a more sustainable world. This research proposes the realization in Alcoy (Spain) of some urban itineraries with mobile devices and with secondary school students, in order to promote an improvement in awareness and action on environmental problems. This activity aims, among other objectives, through informal learning and outside the classroom, to raise awareness among secondary school students about the environmental problems that threaten us. With the completion of a questionnaire, after carrying out these urban itineraries, the results of 214 students confirm that, with this type of activity, there is a notable improvement in the level of awareness and concern for environmental problems. It is also detected that men prefer these types of environmental awareness tests, compared to women, who prefer tests that have a more creative and artistic theme. It is worth continuing to propose this type of activity among students and improve their approach by forecasting, planning, and improving the training of the teachers involved in it.

Use of a mobile plant identification application and the out‐of‐school learning method in biodiversity education

“…Activities utilizing the PlantNet mobile application provide more permanent information about plant species than computer‐based digital herbarium activities (Iskrenovic‐Momcilovic, 2020 ). As a result of plant identification activities conducted with PlantNet, it was observed that students' plant identification skills improved significantly (Santri et al., 2021 ), and a significant improvement was observed in students' awareness and levels of concern about environmental problems (Álvarez‐Herrero, 2023 ). Secondary school students used PlantNet, traditional image‐based printed identification keys, and unstructured searches on the Internet to identify plants and stated that PlantNet was the least difficult of these methods (Lang & Šorgo, 2022 ).…”