“Water and sanitation problems have reached boiling point: children are dying unnecessarily at the rate of 20 jumbo jets crashing every single day.”
Ravi Narayanan

UNEP DHI Eco Challenge 2015
October 2014 – March 2015

Tell your teacher friends and colleagues

We hope you will all be spreading the word and will be helping to introduce the game to your colleagues in education.

It may interest that in the first 4 days after our launch teachers have indicated a total of more 650 students will be playing via the Australian gateway. We wish them all the best and hope that the competition also fosters some ongoing collaboration and partnerships with schools and teachers who might find the more compelling insights around the Global Water Crisis will lead to some form of global action.

EcoChallenge 2015 in Australia
After working to establish the first australian participation in the EcoChallenge 2.0 event, I’ve spent the last 6 months working on the revised event for 2015.

A week ago Curtin Teaching and Learning launched the Australian gateway to the UNEP-DHI EcoChallenge 2015 event.

http://www.curtin.edu.au/ecochallenge

The structure of the 2015 event has changed a little to allow greater opportunity for participation, and will see several countries joining us for the first time – schools from these countries will be playing in the Eco Challenge:

Australia – China – Hong Kong – India – Indonesia – Korea – Malaysia – Philippines – Singapore – Taiwan – Thailand – Vietnam + Mauritius

Participant FlagsIn an interesting development over the weekend, We were able to engage with a representative of an Education for Sustainability organisation based in Mauritius; as a consequence of those discussions, Mauritius have confirmed they will participate this year and it looks like we may have opened the door to all the regional Small Island Developing States.

A colleague and I promoted the event at Kolbe College Celebrating Teaching and Learning Day on Monday October 13 where over 300 teachers attended.  Our workshop, Practical Game Mechanics to Drive Engagement and Achievement had to be repeated as it was so popular.

I’m also an invited speaker at the ECAWA Professional Learning Day to be held at Wesley College on Saturday October 25 where I will be presenting Challenge-based learning for rich authentic engagement,and manning an information stand throughout the day.

Social Presence

We have a established a Facebook page and a Twitter account to assist with recruiting participants and we¹ll continue to use those channels to post information about developments in relation to the Eco Challenge.

Online Resources

We know teachers are busy and we¹re working to try to help you working with your students around this event. With the key focus being on Water Management and Sustainability we¹ve started collecting resources at our Scoop.it page:

http://www.scoop.it/t/curtin-global-challenges

where you¹ll find links to websites that we¹d be using if we were in the classroom.
The websites suggested include those focussed on the global water crisis, equity, as well as some about water management and several that offer lesson plans, curriculum guides and activity suggestions.

We have established a Schools Blog resource this year so all participating teachers and schools from around the world can share resources, approaches, lesson ideas and other discussion points in a collaborative environment.

The international site for the event is also much enhanced and we have a good page there too:  http://www.the-eco-challenge.org/

We’ll be tweeting using the hashtag #ecochallenge2015 and we look forwarding to following your activity.

For more information please contact the Eco Challenge support team:
Website: curtin.edu.au/ecochallenge

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