Aquatic Ambassador Challenge for Girl Guides of Canada
Project Details
Location
Project Lead
A Girl Guide Challenge in partnership with the Girl Guides of Canada Nova Scotia Council aimed at educating youth about aquatic issues in NS and beyond.
Project description
For this project, I developed a Girl Guide Challenge in partnership with the Girl Guides of Canada Nova Scotia Council to educate youth about aquatic issues in NS and beyond. The challenge consists of ten activities that highlight topics such as plastic pollution, ocean acidification, species conservation initiatives, and coastal erosion in an interdisciplinary fashion. Some activities are science focused where others engage learners in the arts/humanities side of ocean health education. After I completed the Ocean Bridge program, GGC reached out to me to ask if I would be interested in adapting the challenge to their new, online program platform, Girls First. After another year of rewriting and reworking the content, the challenge is now available to girls across the country with a crest (designed by 2018 ocean bridge alumnus Lucy Wilkie) for girls in NS. Challenge details can be found here.
Biggest challenge
The biggest challenge was definitely coming up with a wide variety of activities that would be enticing for different types of learners. I didn’t want to make the challenge completely science based as ocean literacy should not just be for scientists. Therefore, I came up with a few activities for girl guides that were more arts/humanities focused. For example, there is an activity where youth use design skills to create a poster to educate others about an aquatic creature that interests them. There is another activity that specifically focuses on how to use social media tactics to engage followers and foster passion for ocean health
Valuable takeaway
Really that anything is possible if you put in the work for it! This project took about two years to complete in total and I am so happy to now have this information out there for keen youth interested in learning more about ocean health issues.
