The Ryan Institute, NUIG’s Digital Enterprise Research Institute, the Education Department at NUI Galway, and Brigit’s Garden in Roscahill, Co. Galway, are working together to create a new intergenerational programme for primary, second and third level students, parents, and retired communities.

The project has been running since 2006, and involves three main aspects:

(1)The creation of a new programme for primary school groups visiting Brigit’s Garden. The programme involves the children investigating different habitats and exploring the food chains and webs within these habitats. This is done using concept building games, a variety of on-site sensory activities, and digital cameras to examine and document specific species within each habitat explored.

(2)The incorporation of a variety of digital elements into the programme including: digital cameras, environmental monitoring equipment such as pH meters and oxygen probes, and the development of an on-line, interactive, educational tool – Brigit’s Virtual Garden.  The children involved in the school visits as in (1) above, will be working towards the larger project of helping us to build a comprehensive Brigit’s Garden nature guide using the images that they have taken in the garden on the digital cameras.

(3) The development of a 10-week environmental peer education training course for transition year students. At the heart of the course is the involvement of the secondary school students with the primary school programmes at Brigit’s Garden as outlined above.  Over the duration of the training course, transition year students work with the Ryan Institute’s Outreach Officer, Education Guides from Brigit’s Garden, and researchers from NUI Galway’s Education Department, to learn and develop skills in the areas of ecology, media, communication, and peer education.

One of the outputs of the project are numerous “species sheets” that the children fill out during their visit, on different plant and animal species that they find in the garden (as in (2) above). After their visit, the transition year students worked with the digital photographs taken in the garden, and (digitally) inserted these into their “species sheets”.  The resulting sheets are compiled into a booklet for the school, and serve as a resource to support the subjects of food chains and webs, local ecology, biodiversity, and human impacts, in the classroom.

The programme will be continuing into 2011, with Tirellan Heights N.S. and Colaiste Iognaid “The Jez” Secondary School students as our project partners.