The effect verification of the educational program that addresses lifestyle awareness and behavior change to reduce marine debris generation.

Abstract

We have developed an educational program for elementary school students that provides an opportunity to learn about marine debris problem while having fun and to think about and take action to solve the problem. The key learning points are ‘Think about the connection between marine debris problem and our daily lives’ and ‘Think about what we can do to solve marine debris problem’. And we also use the character ‘Umipler’ to help people understand the marine debris more closely. We conducted a survey of children who participated in this program to verify the learning effects, satisfaction, and effectiveness of each learning content. As a result, over 80% of the children were achieving the desired learning effects. And as the effectiveness of each learning content became clear, we were also able to obtain directions for optimizing the overall design. We plan to work on optimizing the content and disseminating this program so that it will be used more widely.