Research Highlights

Stage Three:
Youth4Landcare Summit

The presentations, activities and resources developed during the Think Tanks were then shared with a wider audience of peers at the Youth4Landcare Summit. The children gave presentations about riding bikes to reduce carbon emissions; device free days to encourage greater time in the outdoors; the plight of the koalas; encouraging responsible pet ownership; building a natural, plastic-free children's playground; the importance of picking up rubbish to increase the health of local ecosystems; and raising funds for Landcare.

The children also led an array of hands-on activities including nature challenges (tasks, circle sharing, meditation); designing a natural playground; a nature scavenger hunt (searching for specific seeds, trees, animals etc. and tallying results); designing nesting boxes for possums and birds; a photo scavenger hunt (where children are given a list of natural items and must go around taking photos of them); a rock hunt (where the group leaders hide painted rocks around the site, and group members find them, and vice versa); and native tree plantings.

The children also planned a fun, interactive treasure hunt, and the children and an SCU researcher have gone to painstaking efforts to turn this into a permanent digital treasure hunt to encourage children and their families to visit the Landcare site. Clues are placed on signs around the site, and as each clue is discovered, you scan the QR code, which provides the next clue.

The co-researchers from a variety of schools, summit participants from Tamborine Mountain State School, teachers, parents, SCU researchers and Landcare volunteers all enjoyed themselves immensely.

Thank you very much for all the hard work organising the Youth4Landcare summit and arranging for us to be a part of it. The feedback from the kids has been fabulous. They are still talking about it (Lynn Churchill, TMSS).

See image gallery below, or view another stage...
Stage 1: Research Training workshops
Stage 2: Think Tanks

This project is supported by Southern Cross University, through funding from the Australian Government's National Landcare Program.