What is the ARK

Welcome on board of the Green Steps ARK!

This project is non-profit, open source and crew designed. Sharing your feedback and ideas with the development team is essential to improve everybody’s experience. If you have a calling to join the advisory board, let us know.

We wish you an exciting journey, wherever the winds of interest and inspiration may carry you!

Vision

Our vision is a post-national world in which millions of local communities practice a deep connection to the land. They teach about local customs, flora and fauna, instead of national economies and military power. They build bioregional instead of national identities. They trigger the overview effect in every child through age-appropriate exploration of space and a learning focus on empathy and ecology. We need to learn what matters. Now. We need to teach that spaceship Earth is our common home.

We are convinced that in achieving this vision, it is essential to move beyond nation state-based systems of evaluating learning achievement. We need an alternative to PISA, one which does not pitch students, schools and nations against each other, but shows how collaboration between individuals and groups makes us more resilient and life more enjoyable. We think that the Triple Focus is a good model for such an alternative and designed the Green Steps ARK accordingly.

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The Green Steps ARK was initiated with the mission of making place-based education easy - for everyone and everywhere. Place-based education is all about connecting classrooms with communities, the indoors with the outdoors, students and teachers with the neighborhoods and communities in which they learn, play and work. Contrary to national curricula, place-based education emphasizes the development of a local curriculum. Contrary to formal education systems, place-based education includes all members of society as potential teachers and learners.

What can you do with the ARK?

In the main menu on the left side, you can find 7 icons:

• Me: customize your learning cockpit, show your interests and learning progress.
• Communities: create, find, join and mentor communities which match your interests and satisfy your learning instinct.
• Commons: create, find, join and mentor commons: the local spaces which you call home.
• Ecoregions: create, find and mentor ecoregions, the biogeographical territories covering the surface of spaceship Earth.
• Activities: create, find and join activities in 15 different Learning Paths.
• Library: share, find and use best practices of place-based learning from around the world.
• Leaderboard: track our joint effort in learning about and taking care of the places which we call home.

The Green Steps ARK supports you in the design of place-based learning formats. It turns your mobile phone into a powerful tool to build a gamified and purposeful learning environment.

• You can attach selected species to a learning format.
• You can map local features like trees.
• You can connect single mappings into a geocaching route, add stories, characters and challenges, which can be explored by others.
• You can set bioregional learning goals for your community or class.
• You can track the learning progress of students, classes and communities.
• You contribute to the Internet of Nature (IoN).