Visualisation Technology for Eco-Schools

This project aimed to co-produce interactive data-visualisation templates to enable engagement and action in environmental sustainability across primary school ecosystems.

A photo collage of the workshops. Pupils are exploring various documents aided by the researchers. Image credit: Stéphanie Harries.

This project ran from March 2023 to July 2023 and was funded by a Culture, Communication & Media Impact Seed Grant.

Together with the help of our partner school’s Eco-Club, we developed an IDV dashboard that the school can use to plan, monitor, and evaluate their eco-actions, called “Europa’s Eco-Logbook”. Tableau Public was used to create the dashboard, which is a free-to-use software for creating IDV, and links to data on Google Drive.

The Eco-Logbook can be downloaded and duplicated by any school. Follow the instructions in this User Manual to set it up.

Background

Climate change and environmental sustainability (ES) is the most critical issue of our time, and one that students from an early age must actively engage in. Interactive data-visualisation (IDV) has been shown to build understanding and facilitate ES decision-making.

The UK Eco-school programme aims to “rally and unite young people to make realistic but dynamic change, creating positive impacts for our planet now”, outlining Seven Steps (S):

(S1) forming an eco-committee,
(S2) conducting an environmental review of the school,
(S3) preparing an action plan to address three key ES issues,
(S4) linking ES topics in everyday curricula,
(S5) informing and involving the entire school ecosystem,
(S6) monitoring and evaluating the initiatives’ impacts,
(S7) developing an eco-code for sustained action at the school.

Whilst these steps are a starting point toward impact, preliminary discussions with our partner-pilot school revealed challenges moving beyond S2. They had difficulty negotiating actions (S3) feasible within the broader ecosystem and informing/engaging stakeholders beyond school walls (e.g., parents; S5). There is little discussion amongst the teaching community given the associated workloads and the size of the school (3-form; S4-5), impeding progression to S6-7.

As such, objectives were to:

Objective 1: Identify stakeholders in the school ecosystem, the different roles they can play in S3-7, and how they might be supported by IDV.

Objective 2: Investigate IDV design strategies that facilitate involvement of the school ecosystem across S3-S7, to motivate ES action, creating real-world impact.

Objective 3: Produce and disseminate IDV templates that can be reused and extended by other schools, to spread the impact potential.

Methodology

We embarked on an intensive short-term project, driven by a participatory design methodology, with the school’s Eco-Club at the centre. It involved four phases:

Phase 1: Inquiry

Interviews with school stakeholders were conducted, including the Eco-Club coordinator, Eco-Club members, and their parents, toward Objective 1. A framing workshop with the Eco-Club was conducted to understand the types of activities they engage in, the data that can support these activities, and the audiences that the children seek to reach out to.

Phase 2: Design

An ideation workshop was held toward Objective 2 with the Eco-Club and coordinator. These focused on how IDV could support S3, S5, and S6. The workshop produced tangible ideas that were then be developed into prototypes by the research team. Low-fidelity sketched prototypes were produced first, followed by higher-fidelity prototypes using Tableau.

Phase 3: Evaluation

Formative evaluation of IDV prototypes, e.g., through user-testing and interviews, resulted in iterative improvement of prototypes (Objectives 2-3). Summative evaluation of IDV’s impact occurred through observation of decision-making during an Eco-Club observation, as well as interviews with different stakeholders (Objective 2).

Phase 4: Dissemination

In partnership with a second community partner, One Planet Abingdon, we held a hybrid event jointly with the school, addressed to its own community, as well as the broader community of schools in the area, with the aim to share this initiative, material resources, and connect UCL as a community partner. It was live-screencast to reach schools in the UK more broadly.

The interactive data visualisation (IDV) templates

Together with the help of our partner school’s Eco-Club, we have developed an IDV dashboard that the school can use to plan, monitor, and evaluate their eco-actions, called “Europa’s Eco-Logbook”. Tableau Public was used to create the dashboard, which is a free-to-use software for creating IDV, and links to data on Google Drive.

The Eco-Logbook can be downloaded and duplicated by any school. Follow the instructions in this User Manual to set it up.

Evidence of impact

End-of-project event

On 29 June 2023, we held a hybrid event titled “Eco-Schools Best Practices Event: and the potential of technology, data and visualisation in helping children lead their school in climate action”, which was co-led by our partner school, One Planet Abingdon, and ourselves, hosted at the school. The purpose of this event was to enhance the impact of:

Initiatives undertaken by diverse schools aimed at helping children lead their school in climate action, by connecting teachers, parents, community partners, and academics, both locally and nationally;
Our research on technology, data, and visualisation to support such initiatives (i.e., the IDV templates).

The event was recorded and is available to watch here.

From the discussions at the event, we produced a “Key Take-Aways” document that summarises our learnings related to:

What helped participating schools support children’s climate action and leadership;
What challenges schools faced in doing the above, what held them back or didn’t work so well;
Schools’ strategies for maximising impact, e.g., by engaging the broader community;
Insights about the role of technology, data, and visualisation in supporting children’s climate action and leadership.

The Key-Takeaways document can be accessed here.

Some key points of impact stemmed from the event:

Our partner school wants to adapt approaches for parental engagement suggested by another school, e.g., by running monthly/termly climate cafés.
There is a local working group of teachers and parents being set up across schools in the Abingdon area, to form common goals and share strategies.
Several schools have indicated that they want the dashboard implemented in their school.

Research outputs

Our three postgraduate research students have recently submitted their dissertations about this project. We will seek opportunities to transform these into journal or conference outputs and share these to this page as soon as we do.

Future knowledge exchange and research

We are pleased to announce that the further development of the Eco-Logbook has been extended through the UCL Knowledge Exchange and Innovation Fund. The KE partner is Keep Britain Tidy (KBT). In the new project, we will:

Hold workshops with 6 schools (3 primary and 3 secondary) to understand from KBT and school stakeholders what challenges schools face supporting child-led climate action from a national lens, how they can be supported by KBT, and how they can be supported by the Eco-Logbook.
Based on the findings above, refine and extend the Eco-Logbook to make it more accessible, widely available, and free for UK schools to use.
Host an end-of-project online event to celebrate our collaboration with KBT and with schools and disseminate the outcomes to schools across England enrolled in the programme, increasing the impact of the work. A core objective of the project is to create a collaborative network of schools who want to engage in KE activities with UCL in the future, at the intersection of climate change, educational technology, and data visualisation.

We expect that this more robust version of the dashboard can be used in future empirical research and will increase the impact of the Eco-Schools’ programme.