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

their experience. The open-ended nature of the questioning further allowed for assessing par- ticipants’ direct awareness of their experience. RQ3 • Were the participants engaged with the CP? How did the CP promote their motivation and satisfaction in natural-rich environments? All participants completed the proposed activity tasks, suggesting that they engaged with the activities, despite a certain awkwardness displayed by a few participants towards some of the more hands-on activities (as communicated in the notes from adult volunteers), e.g., when asked to touch wet vegetation. Furthermore, comments collected by volunteers in each station indicate that participants showed "focus and commitment", a positive attitude ("good synergy between them") and were responsive to all tasks proposed at each station. The volunteers also observed that participant groups engaged in conversations focusing on performed activities or the natural context. These seem conducive to questioning, as demonstrated in the extracts of dialogues between participants collected by volunteers: "What is peat?", "It’s an animal?", "Who lives here?", "Why do invasive species harm the forest?", "What can we use moss for?". Notes were also indicative of curiosity among some groups regarding natural phenomena ("Why do invasive species harm the forest?"). Additionally, the notes taken by adult volunteers suggest that younger par- ticipants showed "satisfaction and a positive attitude", while indicating that those participants were also more "enthusiastic" than the older ones.

At the end of the trail, in the activity proposed in Station 14, participants’ comments and eval- uative judgments regarding their experience on the trail reveal a high degree of satisfaction with the activities and their exploration of the natural context. After an inductive process, we catego- rized the degree of satisfaction as neutral, positive, or very positive (Fig 12). ‘Neutral’ comments were those in which participants described only the immediate context without any evaluative judgment (e.g., “nature, hiking, forests”). ‘Very positive’ comments differed from ‘positive’ com- ments in the use of superlative adjectives (e.g., ‘‘most beautiful”, referencing landscapes, weather, etc.’), and adverbs that emphasize the verb (e.g., ‘‘I really liked the project and the landscapes were very beautiful.”). ‘Positive’ comments involved favorable explicit evaluations (e.g., ‘‘This Fig 11. Distribution of participants (n = 34), according to age group, by the dominant theme of their responses to the final free, open-ended activity. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0262853.g011 PLOS ONE Cultural probes for environmental education PLOS ONE | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0262853 February 10, 2022 21 / 30