Coral Conscious: The Coral Degradation Education and Activity Book


For our final project, we decided to create an educational activity book that includes important information about coral degradation, coloring pages, games, crafts instructions, and tips the reader can use to promote a more sustainable future. The book we have created is aimed towards the middle to high school age range but we believe that all ages can engage with the activities. The goal of the project is to help increase the scientific literacy among the general public. “[M]ost of our citizens have had only fleeting encounters with a world of science that can appear baffling, intimidating, and even downright unfriendly” (Mooney, C., & Kirshenbaum, S. 2010 p.4) We strongly believe that with the creation of this book, we are exposing the children of the future to information that might not be found within the typical textbook. We wanted to take our love and knowledge of coral, and show people that what they know is not the whole truth. Many people are familiar with climate change and its impact on coral bleaching, but most do not realize the numerous other ways in which coral is affected directly by our actions. 
In creating this activity book we chose to utilize the technique, “Alert, Amplify, and Engage,” that we had learned in class (Pezzullo & Cox, 2018 p.232) to help communicate our issue. During the beginning of the book we identified--”alerted”--the audience to the problem that we chose to focus on: there are more threats to coral than just climate change. Next, we amplified our message by explaining the degree of degradation coral reefs are facing with introductory pages to each issue. Additionally,  those that complete the activities throughout the book have the option to post their creations on social media with the hashtag #CoralConscious--this helps spread the message across to more than just those that we send the activity book to. It encourages people to share their newfound knowledge and have them actively involved with the material. 
One difficulty we ran into while producing this book was pinpointing an age range for this material. Even though the activities seem simplistic, the information is less so. We tried to make it as easy and concise as possible so that anyone, regardless of their background knowledge on coral, would be able to understand. Overall, the project has inspired the both of us to want to continue creating works similar to this one. With the creation of this book, we hope to get people engaged with the topic of coral, and even in a broader sense, science and environmental communication. 






References

Mooney, C., & Kirshenbaum, S. (2010). Ch. 1 – Why Pluto Matters. In Unscientific America: 
How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens our Future (pp. 1–12).

Pezzullo, P. and Cox, R. (2018). Environmental communication and the public sphere, 5th 
Edition. Sage Publications.


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