New tools for teaching: educational cards for primary schools on the prevention of food waste

Abstract

[EN] This article shows the results obtained from the creation of some educational cards for primary school pupils on the topic of the food waste prevention. The collaboration between designers and experts in the educational field was fundamental for this project: we combined the communicative and design skills of the designer with the didactics knowledge of the educators. The activities have been created on the basis of the experiential methodology, the pupils feeling themselves the protagonist of the activities, combining the traditional educational activities, also trough cross-learning of good ecological practices. The proposed activities explore the life cycle of an aliment from when it is purchased by the consumer until it is disposed of, analysing in which stages the consumer wastes food. The exercises were created to understand how to avoid or reduce food waste in those specific phases. The result of the project is composed of two different books containing the educational cards, one for teachers and families with basic information on exercises and the other one for students containing the exercises. The final objective of the educational cards is to sensitize students and adults around them on the food waste problem.