Cultural probes for environmental education: Designing learning materials to engage children and teenagers with local biodiversity

To analyze participants’ degree of satisfaction with the trail walk, we also submitted their responses to the final free, open-ended activity to a similarity analysis of the semantic field. After translating the responses from Portuguese to English, we used the freeware program IRAMUTEQ [41] that produces a maximum tree of words by grouping the words and expres- sions into communities and interconnecting the communities to each other according to the frequency of evocations and the number of co-occurrences [42]. To explore differences between age groups, we performed Pearson’s Chi-square tests (χ2), with a 95% confidence level (p � .05), using the IBM SPSS Statistics for Windows software Version 27 [43]. When verified that more than 20% of expected frequencies were below five; we used the likelihood ratio value (G2) to replace Pearson’s Chi-square value (χ2). Findings RQ1 • Can the CP technique instigate productive questions regarding the surrounding natural environment on behalf of participants? By the end of the trail walk, we retrieved 168 questions. Four were incomplete, making it impossible to categorize them. From the remaining 164 valid questions, 137 were found to be sufficiently distinctive, indicating a high level of diversity of questions posed. Following an inductive process, we analyzed questions with respect to their related activity and the supervi- sor’s comments concerning participants performance in each activity. As a result, we were able to rank valid questions as either ’productive’ or ’strategic’.

The ’strategic’ category corresponds to questions triggered by the invitation to complete the study’s tasks or by design of the activity itself. In these cases, participants overlooked the opportunity to obtain new information through questioning by deriving questions based on those presented on the tokens. For example, we received the question "Describe the sounds of nature", which is similar to the question posed to participants during the activity at Station 11: "(. . .) make a list of the sounds you identified". Note that our use of the term ’strategic’ differs from King’s [25], who in one study used the word to define questions "used by students to guide their planning and monitoring activity during problem solving". In the ’productive’ category, we included internally oriented questions triggered by the desire to question and obtain knowledge or confirm previous knowledge related to the external context. This category comprises externally oriented questions triggered by participants’ exploration of the external context, such as the natural context, or the previously performed activities. In either context, ’productive’ questions are those that refer to a genuine interest in knowing more. An example of an internally oriented question is "Why is biodiversity important?" which does not directly accrue from the activity performed in Station 3 ("The smells of the forest"). Also, a comment from the station supervisor suggests that the group who produced this ques- tion was suitably motivated ("They are doing the work with certain dedication."). An example

of an externally oriented question is ‘‘How could the water from the lagoon be used?”, which, although it does not directly relate to the corresponding activity, relates to the natural context of Station 10 (‘‘Where are the animals?”), where it was produced. Note that this station was also near the lagoon that can be found in Miste´rios Negros (Fig 6). From the 164 valid questions, nine-tenths (89%; n = 146) were found to be ‘productive’, while nearly all the questions were externally oriented (94%; n = 137), focusing on the immedi- ate natural context or performed activities. Only 11% (n = 18) were categorized as ‘strategic’ PLOS ONE Cultural probes for environmental education PLOS ONE | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0262853 February 10, 2022 15 / 30