The Global Children Designathon (GCD) 2023 Project.

The Global Children Designathon (GCD) Project was held on Saturday 15th April 2023 at the Global Goals Community Centre by DEAN Initiative. The Global Children’s Designathon is a yearly event that uses design and problem-based learning to encourage children to think creatively about sustainability issues. Each year, children from around the world come together to devise solutions for global environmental problems, focusing on specific themes. The theme for Global Children’s Designathon 2023 is “Our World: Restoring Biodiversity Big and Small“. The objective of the project is centered to inspire and provide a platform for students to engage and know, what biodiversity is, what the main causes of the loss in biodiversity are, and how it affects the planet and the future of all living things. To offer students a chance to participate in a well-structured design thinking workshop, to introduce students to various ideas and brainstorming techniques, and to enable students to prototype their own solutions to tackle biodiversity loss and promote co-existence. 14 students made it to the finals of this year’s cohort and were supported by 8 facilitators. There was a gender balance agenda that ensured participants to be 7 boys and 7 girls. The Global Children’s Designathon is an initiative of Designathon Works, Netherland.

The Initiative is centered on raising early-stage pupils through education to be able to understand their environment and basically understand climate change from the early stage. The children had generated a wide range of ideas, they were happy to create prototype sketches as instructed. This process allowed the children to refine their ideas and communicate them more effectively. By the end of this segment, children had generated a variety of solutions to the problem at hand and had visually represented these ideas through their prototype sketches. The children were also asked to design a prototype of their ideas. The prototyping section was a critical step as it enabled the children to turn their ideas into actionable solutions to tackle biodiversity loss. They made use of eco-friendly materials such as paper, straws, pencils, food sticks, cardboard, and so on, to create their solution prototype. The teams made different prototypes as stated below:

• TEAM INVENT: Created an idea around houses in the cities and rural areas. These ideas encourage house owners in the cities and rural areas to cultivate vegetations around their houses by planting local trees and flowers especially creepy plants to grow over the roofs of these houses; making artificial ponds to grow species of fishes enabling interactions in our ecosystem. These innovations will bring a habitable environment for animals, insects, and man to boost living coexistence between man and animals in the ecosystem, create cool and conducive habitat, thereby increasing biodiversity.

• TEAM CHANGE: focused on modern houses, they want to help flying insects like butterflies, birds, and bees to increase pollination. The ideas are described “we want to engage in the cultivation of flowers in our Gardens, this will attract butterflies and bees, increase their population, thereby increasing Biodiversity” and the ways in which they think they can promote their ideas is to inform their parents to purchase flower seeds and demarcate an area for the seeds to be planted around their houses.

• TEAM DESIGN: focused on forest, they are particular about helping wild animals and the way in which they want to help these wild animals is by making spaces and food for life, and to teach people about Biodiversity. Their ideas were to introduce forest rangers to ward off poachers who indiscriminately kill wild animals for their parts thereby drastically reducing the population of animals in the forest. They also thought that another way to promote their ideas is by soliciting help from the government and asking private organizations to help implement these ideas.

At DEAN Initiative, we provide innovative, educational learning programs, in an extra-curricular format. The students in our participating schools’ constituents are opened up to sustainable skill-based educational resources and learning experiences that turn them from mere academic students into educational solution-based resource students. Our education interventions secure an unwavering partnership with the government that ensures smooth delivery in all participating schools without any form of technical issues. Models are co-delivered by volunteer educators, which makes delivery less expensive. Real-time teachers in participating schools also participate in delivering models as part of their partnership contribution to delivering our innovative solutions. Students are allowed to create their ideas and innovations, rather than listening to lessons only, they are now able to co-create their learning resources and as well enjoy the freedom of creating solutions to basic community challenges raised as problems in their classes.