IO2 Informed decisions – link for EN only

Informed Decisions

Nowadays, access to information in the hyper-connected world in which we live presents its own problems that are very different from those of past generations. One of the main problems of today's information age is distinguishing reliable sources of information and relevant data from those that are not. The following activities aim to highlight the difficulty of navigating the ocean of knowledge on the internet without getting lost or shipwrecked. Another issue that will be addressed in this section is the appropriate use of electronic devices and the alternatives that can be offered in the family context.

Activity 4.1. The environmental impact of your actions

There are some Girl drawing a recycling symbol things that we can make in our own homes to fight global warming. But often the problem is that we don't know where to start.

In this activity, the family will reflect on the products we consume on a regular basis and then search for information on their environmental impact to propose some solutions.

For this activity, we are going to sort out different objects according to their impact on the environment. We will need an object from each of the categories listed so we can arrange the list playing with the family. You can collect the objects yourself or ask your children to look for them. If you do not have some of the objects, you can draw them on a piece of paper.

Age range: 9 - 15 years

Download the English version: The environmental impact of your actions

A guide for the guide

During the activity, it could be helpful to keep in mind the learning objectives to guide your children to reach them. The objectives are:

To reflect on their lifestyle
To learn that critical thinking can lead to changes that can have a positive impact on our world
To experience that our intuition is not always enough to understand a complex problem. We need information from experts

Preparation for the activity

There is no need for special knowledge to do this activity.

Keep in mind that your children/grandchildren may point out or criticize some of the things that are done at home, because this is an activity that analyzes the family’s lifestyle. Before you begin the activity, you may want to think about some possible answers to suggestions that you do not want or you cannot discuss with them at this time. However, you are not supposed to have an answer for every question - this activity is for the whole family to learn together, so you can start without preparation.

For this activity, we are going to sort out different objects according to their impact on the environment. We will need an object from each of the categories listed below so we can make the list playing with the family. You can collect the objects yourself or ask your children to look for them. If you do not have some of the objects, you can draw them on a piece of paper:

Fruit and vegetables (For example: one apple)
Furnishing and carpets (For example: a toy chair)
Animal products, except dairy (For example: one piece of ham)
Communication and IT equipment (For example: a mobile phone)
Dog and cat food
Postal service
Grains
Household equipment
Clothes
Dairy
Motor vehicles
Gas and petrol (for cooking and heating)
Public transport
Flights
Pharmaceuticals

You could also do this activity as a contest. If so, you would need paper and pen for all the contestants. If you have access to a printer, take a look at the cards at the end of this document.

The activity step by step

Present the objects and the activity.
Put the objects on the table and explain to your children that you are going to analyse the environmental impact of the things we consume. Explain that each object represents a general type of product (for example, the apple represents all fruits and vegetables).
Arrange all objects in a row so that objects with a higher environmental impact are at one end and those with a lower environmental impact are at the other end. This can be done cooperatively or as a contest.(Several questions may arise in this section. See the following section to find out how to deal with them).
Let's analyze the products we consume or use at home in our daily life.
Search for the answer using the Internet. Some keywords that may help you are: carbon footprint, environmental impact of products, life-cycle assessment.You probably won’t find a list with all the products in the activity. You can choose those you can compare more easily, use one or two sources of information you find interesting, or you can compare some of the products and use different sources to complete the arrangement.
Some questions may get no answers. It is not the point to answer all of them, just to understand how difficult the problem is.
Compare the results you found on the internet with those you made as a hypothesis in step 3.
Make some reflections and conclusions together. (You can find some clues at the end of the document)

Some doubts that may arise

During the activity, some doubts may arise. This is good. We encourage you to let the doubts and mistakes happen and use them for reflection.

To make the comparison, should the use of the product or also its production be taken into account?

It would be interesting to look at both.

How can I compare an apple with the use of a car?

You can agree on which criterion to use. For example, you can compare the amount of vegetables and fruit that the family eats in a year with the use of the car during that same year. Which of the two things do you think has more impact?

Should we take into account everything about production, distribution, transport, etc?

It depends on your criterion. The more complicated it gets, the more difficult the activity will be, but you may also learn more. Either way, it is not important for this part of the activity

Questions for reflection, self-assessment and conclusions

Was it easy to arrange the objects in line?
Was it easy to find the information on the Internet?
Were the answers similar to what you thought? Don’t worry if they were different, this happens all the time for a variety of reasons
If the answers were different, why do you think that might be?

How can you use your new knowledge to adapt a more sustainable lifestyle in your house? What small action(s) will you take?

References

Activity 4.2. Screen-free corner

Adults, young people and children spend alot of time in front of screens. Restricting the use of digital devises is a common source of conflict within families. This activity seeks to offer a complementary alternative this.

This aim is to focus on achievable screen-free activities that allow us to build quality time using a shared process, where every member of the family has their own voice heard.

The activity tries to identify screen-free family activities that can be facilitated by the design and implementation of a screen-free corner.

Age range: All

Download the English version: Screen-free corner

A guide for the guide

Preparation for the activity

To get the activity off to a good start, adults can prepare a short presentation on what activities they did as children. Pictures of when they were young doing the activity, as well as objects, or stories to illustrate the activity, will help stimulate the interest of the children.

Another important thing is to already have thought of a space in the house for our corner without screens. This will allow us to be more concrete and effective when making our proposals.

One of the activities is brainstorming. This is a very easy technique to perform even if you have no experience with it. The idea is that everyone participating proposes ideas quickly and creatively and these are included in a list. The most important thing is not to discard any idea, no matter how absurd or complicated it may seem. It is from the apparently strangest ideas that the most brilliant projects can come. When the list is finished, we discuss which ideas seem most achievable and motivating for everyone. It is also important to make sure that everyone involved contributes at least one or more ideas.

The activity step by step

First, the participating adults explain to the young people the way they lived when they were the same age as them and what activities, games, sports ...etc, they practiced. For this they can use photos or objects that allow them to explain these activities more easily.
Now it is the child’s/young person’s turn to explain which non-digital activities they like to do or would like to try.
At this point we will propose one or more activities to do together. For this we will use brainstorming to propose different activities and choose those that we think are best suited to everyone in the family. It is important that everyone participates in the brainstorming and contributes at least one activity that they would like to do, so we ensure that the activities chosen are sufficiently motivating for the whole family.
Once the activities are chosen, we try to make a list of the things that make doing these activities more difficult than digital entertainment and look for what we would need to make it easier.
It's time to put all the ideas we came up with to facilitate our screen-free activities in a physical space inside our house - our screen-free corner.
Finally, we will use a calendar to note when the activities will take place, and a day later to evaluate if the activities went well, propose new activities or improvements to our screen-free corner.

Some doubts that may arise

What activities do we choose? When choosing activities, we must make sure that they are achievable and they sufficiently motivate everyone in the family.

If there is a very diverse range of interests, we can choose introductory activities matched to the different personal motivations and later evaluate which of them worked better for most of the people in the family.

What do we add to our screen-free corner? The aim of the Screen-Free Corner is to make it easier for us to carry out these alternative activities. The chosen area should have all of the materials needed for the activities as well as any items that help us to organize them, such as information, a calendar etc. The aesthetic can be determined at the time of choosing the corner. Spend some time decorating and organizing it.

The corner without screens is not something definitive, we can add and remove what we want in the future.

Questions for reflection, self-assessment and conclusions

Did we get everyone to contribute ideas?
Is thinking and creating the screen-free corner an activity in itself for the family?

Questions for when the family evaluates how well the screen free corner and alternative activities worked.

Did our plans work?
What activities that were not chosen would you like to try in the future?
How have we felt about going without screens for a while?
Have we learned new things?
What can we improve about our screen-free corner?
What do you think we can change to have an even better time in future alternative activities?

References

Activity 4.3. The information race

This activity is intended to be a game that aims to highlight some of the mistakes we make when searching for information on the Internet and also to suggest more critical and reflective search habits.

The game consists of a questionnaire, the answers to which must be searched on the Internet. Speed is important to win, but finding the right answers is even more important.

Who will be able to find the most correct answers in the least amount of time? Well, let's see!

Age range: 9 - 15 years old

Download the English version: The information race

A guide for the guide

Our children belong to the so-called "Digital Natives" generation, however, several studies show that, in general, the youth of today have poorly developed Internet search skills. This game aims to reveal some common mistakes that young people make when they search on the Internet, to make them visible and to encourage more thoughtful and rational habits when searching for information.

Below you will find some tips to get the most out of the game and some objectives you might want to keep in mind while doing the activity and, especially, during the final reflection:

Show that the answer that you find quickly is not necessarily the best answer.
Choosing the right keywords for your search is crucial.
We must read the information carefully to see if it fits our search correctly.
Not all the information we find on the Internet is true or mistake-free, checking the information is part of the process of searching for information.

Preparation for the activity

For this activity you will only need:

One device for each participant to do the searches on the Internet (these can be smartphones, tablets or laptops/computers)
Paper and pen

The following section provides a series of questions with the answers so that other than some reading by the adult prior to the activity, no further preparation is necessary. If you like the activity or want to adapt it to your family's own areas of interest, you can change the list of questions, always keeping in mind that the most important thing about this activity is not the results but the reflections we will make after the game.

The activity step by step

The race of questions

In this activity we will give a list of questions to the two or more people participating in the game. The premise is simple – participants, starting at the same time, look for the answers on the internet. The person who finishes first will receive 20 points, the second 18 points, the third 16 points and so on. Once all the participants have answered all the questions we check the answers. For this you can use the links provided after the list of questions. For each incorrect answer subtract 3 points. The winner is the person who has the most points at the end.

At the end of the activity, we will think about what difficulties we have encountered when looking for the questions on the Internet and if these were the same depending on the type of question asked .

List of questions for the race:

Who said "and yet it moves"?
What is the Chinese restaurant syndrome?
Is there such a thing as karma?
How should you use your cell phone to reduce your risk of cancer?
Do aliens exist?
Which of the following people does not have a chemical element named after them?
Einstein, Bhor, Newton, Marie Curie o Fermi
How many people have lived on the earth throughout history.
In science it is important to do good research, but it is more important to ask good questions. An example is that of a person who was walking in the field and suddenly asked himself, Is it my imagination, or did I hear more birds around here in my childhood?
This scientist began to investigate the answer and wrote what is considered the first treatise on ecology in history, Silent Spring.

What was the name of the person who asked that question?
People have had to be confined to their homes during an epidemic many times. Isaac Newton, for example, took advantage of the confinement of the bubonic plague to do scientific experiments and discovered that white light is composed of all the colors of the rainbow.
In what year did this famous bubonic plague epidemic occur?
Does cooking in the microwave destroy the walls of food cells?

Answers to the questions

Here you have some links where you can find the answers to the questions.

Some doubts that may arise

Our teenagers have grown up with answers to questions readily available on the internet. The fact that doubts arise about what is correct or incorrect information is a good thing, as it can teach them to be more critical and demanding of what they read.

Take advantage of these doubts to stimulate critical thinking, applauding their questions and their scepticism and encouraging them to carry on with their reasoning. If any of the questions in the game do not satisfy you and the teenagers do not accept the proposed answers, encourage them to argue against it and tell them how complicated reality can be sometimes.

Why should I believe the answers given in this activity?

You shouldn’t. You can go deeper into the search to try to find out whether the information we give is correct or not. It is a very interesting exercise from which you can learn a lot. If you detect any mistakes in our answers, we will be very grateful if you would let us know.

Questions for reflection, self-assessment and conclusions

First, pay attention to the questions some people got correct and others didn’t. Think back and try to remember how the search was made. Compare the search of those who found a right answer with those that were wrong:

Did you use the same keywords in the search?
Which of the suggested entries did you choose as your source of information?
Did you read carefully what was written in the text?

Secondly, ask the participants to say if they almost made a mistake in any of the answers, but realised the mistake before writing the answer down.

What mistake were they about to make?
How did they realize it and how did they correct it?

Finally, choose a question where all participants made a mistake. If there is none, choose a question where someone gave a wrong answer.

How should you have searched to minimize the probability of error?

References