BeeLife

Good morning, everyone from my side as well and thank you for the kind invitation and warm introduction! On behalf of my co-authors, that you can see here, I will introduce our latest work from the BeeLife project. I’m very grateful for the fantastic work that my team has done here.

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If you look at the picture – what do you think, how would the picnic look like without bees, in particular wild bees, what would be missing?

Well, as you can see, all of a sudden, our picnic would look pretty poor!

Particularly wild bees are very effective pollinators; however, they are highly endangered and several of the many species are already extinct.

If these species they are so important, then why don‘t we protect them?

Well, the answer is: Because we don‘t know them!

And that’s exactly what we want to change in our project, already from an early stage in life.

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How do we want to achieve that? Following the quote of Konrad Lorenz, our goal is to build a personal connection with the problem.

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To support that, we combine insights from several research directions:

Incorporating established principles from the field of multimedia learning supports us in designing learning experiences which are particularly suitable for our target group, for instance, by including game-elements or characters with human-like personality traits.

Models of environmental psychology give us ideas how to support the transition from goal intentions to behavioral routines.

To ensure a sustained use of our approach in the classroom, we further aimed at connecting it with the biology curriculum.

And we made sure to cover the user’s perspective in software development.

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The heart of our project is a mobile app called BeeLife that aims to bring the real biological world in the digital space in a way children can relate to.

With the help of our environmental experts, we selected a set of 11 wild bee species with particularly salient habits and characteristics, complemented by one honeybee.

Our current prototype already features six characters: The mason bee Mia, the leaf-cutter bee Chilli and her opponent the sharp-tailed bee Coelia, two male bee characters, the garden wolly bee Mani and the large earth bumblebee Terris, as well as the pantaloon bee Hirti, an oligolectic bee species. All characters have a human-like appearance and a very unique personality.

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In total, our app currently involves 6 gamified levels, each one featuring a specific topic. For the first level, that you can see here, biodiversity is the focus of learning, as each character introduces themselves and their habits in the beginning. We combined that with interleaved quiz elements to support retention.

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Another level requires to find the difference between two pictures, like the ones I showed you in the beginning. The goal is to make the benefits of wild bees for our daily lives very salient. Upon selecting the differing elements, our wild bee characters provide related explanations.

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After hearing about that you might think – great, even more screen time for the kids! Well, of course, that‘s not the goal! The app is not meant to stand alone and replace nature experiences, but to be embedded in actual environmental activities, to link the app’s content to the real world.

The offline part happens in so-called “project workshops” that can feature activities such as planting flowers in the school garden that oligolectic species depend on, or to analyze or even build nesting aids with the teacher.

Across the entire development process, we aimed at involving our participating stakeholders at several points, in particular teachers as facilitators of our approach in schools, and children as future users of the app.

We had a first beta test at our University Science Day in Stuttgart in June, which gave us very encouraging feedback, and among others showed that our app is suitable already for children in 4^th grade, so we also included a primary school in the subsequent evaluation phase.

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Very recently, we actually conducted the first pilot evaluation in 3 of our participating schools.

In addition to using the app and participating in the project workshops, the children completed three online questionnaires: before, directly afterward and with a delay of three weeks.

In addition to capturing user-related variables such as smartphone use or affinity for technology, we repeatedly assessed learning gains related to the dimensions of environmental awareness, attitude, knowledge – in terms of retention and transfer, and behavioral intention.

The children also provided self-ratings on motivation and user experience as part of the posttest.

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When we look at the results in our initial sample of 76 pupils, I was surprised that about 80% of them reported to have their own smartphone – given that about 1/3 of them was only in 4^th

Unfortunately, over the three points of measurement we had a quite high dropout, which left us with only 44 complete datasets that we could analyze in the end.

Very encouraging, even with the small pilot sample we already found a significant improvement in retention performance between pre- and posttest, that also persisted in the delaytest, even though we see a much greater variance here.

Taking a closer look, we also found that this improvement in retention performance significantly correlated with self-reported motivation and the user experience rating on the app.

However, we did not find significant improvements in transfer performance, attitude, or behavioral intention.

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What are our next steps in the project? Well, of course we will continue our evaluation in some more schools to gain broader insights.

We also encountered a few technical bugs we are currently fixing and have already plans and ideas for extending the scope of levels and features, for instance with competitive and adaptive elements.

We also plan to extend the application settings of our approach outside of schools, and use our contents in urban natural oases; among others, we cooperate here with the Bee Center Magstadt and our Green Office at the University of Stuttgart.

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And with that, I thank my project team and our collaborators, I thank you for your attention and I’m looking forward to your questions.