Kids Love Stories: New Ways of Saving Energy

Saving energy is an important issue in the world of today. The challenge is to raise awareness of energy efficiency and to decrease the overall consumption. In this paper, we present the approach behind the THE4BEES project, which aims to sensitize children and young people regarding the importance of saving our resources. In this context, we designed a new concept that involves pupils from a number of schools in an interactive and interdisciplinary way. They perform various tasks, ranging from the installation and observation of real-time sensors, to performing statistical analysis and the communication and visualization of the results as story maps. Our aim is to find out whether our concept is suitable for persuading children and young people to behave in a more energy-efficient way in their classrooms. In order to do this, we get the pupils to create and tell their own stories on the subject of saving energy. In this paper, we present the theoretical concept and the first results of working with pupils.