Beyond technology, through research in education: The collaborative situated design of an environmental health education platform

The research presented in this paper is centered on the design process of a participatory environmental health education platform. The platform was collaboratively designed by a team of environmental education, environmental health and information and communication technologies (ICT) experts, based on the results of previous projects on ICT in education, on science education knowledge, and on a set of research experiments in educational contexts. The design process was situated in the context of Portuguese primary schools’ spaces, and of its environmental health problems, as well as in primary schools’ science education curricular activities. The designed platform will support monitoring and action in health, and environment, and will include a searchable, and updateable database integrating the annotated environmental health data, created by school children, schools’ blogs, and schools’ collaborative documents.