Co-designed interactive dashboard for sustainability-conscious schools
This project aims to co-produce an interactive data-visualisation dashboard, “Our Eco-Logbook”, to foster children and teenagers’ leadership in environmental sustainability and climate action in their school communities.
Climate change and environmental sustainability (ES) is the most critical issue of our time, and one that students from an early age must actively engage in. Interactive data-visualisation (IDV) has been shown to build understanding and facilitate ES decision-making, but this has yet to be explored with children.
Our research aims to understand how IDV might foster children’s identities as agents of change and ES leaders in their school communities, and what scaffolding and support is needed from their community to facilitate this.
Use the Eco-Logbook at: https://eco-logbook.org
Early development
Version 1.0 of the Eco-Logbook was developed in partnership with primary children in the Eco-Club at Europa School, as well as three MA Education & Technology students at UCL. This first phase of the project ran from March 2023 to July 2023 and was funded by a Culture, Communication & Media Impact Seed Grant.
Check out the research website for Phase I of the Eco-Logbook.
Ongoing research and development
The further development of the Eco-Logbook has been extended through the UCL Knowledge Exchange and Innovation Fund (EPSRC: EP/X525649/1). Our Knowledge Exchnage partner is Keep Britain Tidy (KBT), the charity who runs the Eco-Schools UK programme. In Phase II of the project, we will:
- Hold workshops with 6 schools (3 primary and 3 secondary) to understand from KBT and school stakeholders what challenges schools face supporting child-led climate action from a national lens, how they can be supported by KBT, and how they can be supported by the Eco-Logbook. (COMPLETE)
- Based on the findings above, refine and extend the Eco-Logbook to make it more accessible, widely available, and free for UK schools to use. (COMPLETE)
- Host an end-of-project online event to celebrate our collaboration with KBT and with schools and disseminate the outcomes to schools across England enrolled in the programme, increasing the impact of the work. A core objective of the project is to create a collaborative network of schools who want to engage in KE activities with UCL in the future, at the intersection of climate change, educational technology, and data visualisation. (7th November)
Related publications
- Gauthier, A., Vasalou, a., Londoño, AT , Wu, N., and Konyani, B. (2025) Empowering Young Environmental Leaders: Designing Interactive Data Visualisation to Foster Children’s Agency in Eco-Schools. International Journal of Child-Computer Interaction, 100749. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijcci.2025.100749
- Gauthier, A., Konyani, B., Tisnes Londoño, A., Wu, N., Vasalou, M. (2024). Participatory design of “Our Eco-Logbook”: supporting children’s climate action through interactive data visualisations. Extended abstract in ACM Interaction Design and Children Conference. https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3628516.3659376
Key contact: Andrea Gauthier
Research team: Andrea Gauthier, Mina Vasalou, Yang Yang, Keep Britain Tidy
MA students: Alejandra Tisnes, Billy Konyani, Na Wu