Schoolchildren from La Higuera become guardians of ocean health

Through games and participatory dialogue, researchers from UCN and the SECOS Institute organized an outreach event with students from two rural schools in Punta de Choros and Chungungo, focused on ocean health, resilience, and marine ecosystems, as part of the IDEOS project on ocean health in Chile.

How healthy is our backyard when that backyard is the Pacific Ocean? With this question as a driving force, boys and girls from the schools of Punta de Choros and San Andrés de Chungungo took part in an innovative ocean literacy workshop designed to connect advanced scientific knowledge with the local identity of coastal communities.

The initiative was carried out במסגרת the Fondef IDEOS project, a collaboration between the Universidad Católica del Norte (UCN), Data Observatory, and the Millennium Institute in Coastal Socio-Ecology (SECOS). During the sessions, students set aside traditional textbooks to explore concepts such as ecosystem services and benefits, environmental pressures, and the Ocean Health Index (OHI), an indicator that measures the condition of ocean health across multiple dimensions.

Science with a sense of place
The activity was led by researcher Pilar Haye, full professor at the Faculty of Marine Sciences at UCN and alternate director of SECOS, who, together with researchers Nicolás Segovia and Nicolás Latorre, engaged students in discussions about key ecosystem and marine concepts through a close, hands-on experience.

“These activities aim to bring ocean health closer to children through a participatory experience, linking concepts such as ecosystems, resilience, and ecosystem services with their everyday reality and with the sense of place they build in relation to the sea,” Haye explains.

For the schoolchildren of La Higuera, the sea is not just a landscape; it is their families’ livelihood and the heart of their culture. For this reason, the talk “Ocean health also matters” focused on local examples, allowing students to identify the pressures affecting their environment and how research and collaboration can help protect it.

The day concluded with a playful activity that became the attendees’ favorite: a memory game specifically designed to reinforce ocean health concepts. This tool allowed researchers to assess, in real time, how children naturally and enjoyably incorporated complex terms.

This action is not an isolated effort. It is part of a broader initiative within the IDEOS project, which seeks to develop an open-access online platform on ocean health, democratizing access to information so that communities, decision-makers, and now also new generations can understand and care for the marine ecosystem using continuously updated data and evidence.

By strengthening the link between scientific knowledge and rural education, this initiative plants a seed of environmental stewardship in those who will be the future stewards of Chile’s coasts.

The online platform, the final outcome of the project, will be available after its presentation on May 27, which will be broadcast on the social media accounts of Data Observatory and SECOS.