Short updates on what we are learning, what we are building, and the decisions behind how the study is run.
All five classroom sheets are now downloadable: the drawing activity, the questionnaire, the teacher's guide, the family consent sheet and the follow-up lesson. They are English only, deliberately. A machine translation of a research instrument is worse than no translation at all — if the prompt shifts meaning between countries, the results stop being comparable. Ask us for the language you need and we will build it with a native speaker.
Misozi and Katchereza primary schools, both beside Kasungu National Park, have now completed the activity. Almost every child said protecting wild animals mattered to them. Seventeen drew a future with no animals in it. That gap between what children value and what they expect is the reason this project exists.
It would be easier to teach a lively lesson about endangered species and then ask for a picture. It would also destroy the data. Children draw what they have just been told. So the order is fixed: a few short questions first, the prompt read word for word, then the drawing — and the wildlife lesson afterwards, never before.
A drawing coded “threat” in Malawi and one coded “threat” in Finland have to mean the same thing, or the comparison is an illusion. Getting that right across cultures is the hardest open problem in this project, and it is why the coding is done centrally rather than by each school.
There is no mailing list yet. Schools that join the map are emailed directly when there is something worth sending — results, prize news, and new materials.