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

question tokens (χ2(9) = 51,828; p < .001). The token "Describe. . . in your own words" pro- moted more ’strategic’ questions than the other tokens. Three-quarters (12 in 16) of the ques- tions produced with this token were found to be ’strategic’, possibly owing to the descriptive nature of the token that encourages the production of questions by adding just one noun. RQ2 • Can CP provide an outdoor learning experience that taps into the value of sensory, emo- tional, and aesthetic experiences in and with nature? From the last free, open-ended activity, we retrieved 34 responses (two participants did not respond), which were then translated from Portuguese to English. From the analysis, we observed that 22 participants responded with free-word associations (e.g., ‘‘silence, singing, birds”) and 12 with phrases (e.g., ‘‘This journey was magnificent with beautiful plants and landscapes”). We categorized all 34 responses according to their "dominant theme", or the main idea expressed when attributing meaning to the experience. Responses highlight participants’ per- spectives that arise from features of the activity, with our interpretation of the "dominant theme" closely following Litfin’s [44] definition of a "frame" of an object or phenomenon. Fol- lowing an inductive process, and after analyzing all possible answers, we identified three main thematic categories. We infer that participants focused their responses on one of the following:

Fig 8. Distribution of ‘productive’ and ‘strategic’ questions (n = 93) of younger participants (ages 10–14) according to the stations where they were formulated (the total number of questions produced in each station varies between 15 and 16). https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0262853.g008 PLOS ONE Cultural probes for environmental education PLOS ONE | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0262853 February 10, 2022 18 / 30