At the Genoa Science Festival, children stepped into the shoes of scientists involved in marine restoration! Our facilitators set up an educational workshop for elementary school classes dedicated to the REEForest project. The children experienced through games our efforts to restore Cystoseira.
In addition to showing the various stages of our project, the workshop was devoted to describing the importance of biodiversity, showing that the life of each organism is interconnected with many others, and to exploring the relationship between humans and nature in its negative and positive aspects.
From the moment they entered the lab room, classes were immersed in the marine environment. A large blue carpet decorated with different marine organisms accommodated the children, who could walk on it and choose where to sit. As they walked across the carpet, the children saw various marine environments and organisms and began to appreciate the importance of biodiversity. The facilitators told them about algal forests, the characteristics of this habitat, their vulnerabilities, and the work needed to restore them.
Once the children had an idea of what Cystoseira is and its importance in the marine ecosystem, the games began. The classes had fun with a memory game dedicated to marine biodiversity and the anthropogenic pressure that threatens it. Once all the tiles were paired, the children placed the creatures they found in the environment where they live, building a poster of the marine ecosystem. The overview allowed them to reflect on where the various organisms live and to emphasize the importance of algal forests for the survival of many species.
In the second activity, the classes experienced firsthand the various stages of marine restoration, from the construction of the REEForest project’s symbolic disks to the outplanting of young algae to the reef. The children, divided into teams, built a cardboard copy of the disks and glued the seaweed onto it. Thus began a small relay race: the children ran to plant the tiles on a cardboard reef restoring the algal cover. No matter who won, the challenge itself is a win-win: the classes learned how to care for the environment and endangered ecosystems even when they are not immediately obvious, such as underwater algal forests.
Telling children what are the various species of Cystoseira, their importance, and what we are doing to restore them is critical to preparing future generations for marine biodiversity conservation.
