The goal of the educational initiative Lionfish is to get teachers, schools, and students involved in addressing climate change head-on and helping Europe become carbon-neutral by 2050. Seeing the European Green Deal as a growth strategy that highlights the role of universities, training centres, and schools in this objective, we aimed to include parents and the larger community in addition to students. Our strategy involved developing cutting-edge educational resources that offer advanced climate change knowledge and an immersive virtual reality experience. By adding empathy, this enables students to experience the difficulties posed by climate change in a way that seems urgent, genuine, and relatable, promoting learning that goes beyond conventional approaches. The project also invites students to investigate local sustainability and climate change concerns using visual thinking tools.

Three primary activities made up the project:

The collaboration produced a virtual reality experience centred on an elderly Cypriot fisherman and his son, who are having difficulty catching the same amount of fish as before because of the Mediterranean Sea's warming. The experience is based in Cyprus. Invasive species like Lionfish are partially to blame for the fall in fish numbers.

The "Lionfish" teaching and learning guide was created with the Cyprus national curriculum in mind. This guide, which is intended for students in grades 12 through 16, links the 360-degree VR video "End of Line" to other curriculum-based learning materials.

The last phase of the project involves presenting the results to educators in Cyprus, the Mediterranean area, the European Union, and around the world regarding the usefulness of virtual reality and associated digital tools. One of the multiplier events that involved 57 different teachers was featured in this.

What were the concrete outputs and other results of your project?

Fox Media Documentaries coordinated, wrote, researched, pre-produced, and produced END OF LINE, a VR experience from Cyprus about an old fisherman from Limassol taking his son fishing from a boat near the coast and dealing with climate challenges. Based on the VR-film pilot studies were conducted by CYENS with 6 participating teachers and 83 students.

The EdMedia team finalised the teaching & learning manual.

Furthermore, they created training workshops for educators of four local schools. (See WP5 Multiplier Event Evaluation.)

In May 2024, the learning scientist of EdMedia announced LIONFISH E+ had been accepted as part of Scientix EU, the Community of Science Teachers in Europe! (https://www.scientix.eu/projects/project-detail?articleId=1766853 )

EdMedia held a virtual multiplier event which received very positive feedback (see “WP5 Multiplier Event Evaluation")

Presentations of the project at international conferences.