EcoLogicaCup: Teaching Ecology on a Web Platform

Sciences and scientific methodologies cannot today be limited to the small percentage of students in the schools; all students could know and understand the natural processes and the role they will play in their futures. Nowadays, natural sciences and ecology give rise to much interest in many scientific and not scientific areas because studying ecology we can learn more about our ‘natural home’, the biosphere. In this paper, an example of an innovative tool to support and integrate teaching sciences in the school is reported. The initiative, named EcoLogicaCup, is addressed to students of secondary schools in Italy (from eleven to nineteen years) and aims at arousing interest in students and young people about ecological topics or problems concerning the health of our biosphere. EcoLogicaCup is promoted by the Observatory on Marine Mediterranean Ecology of the University of Salento (Italy) in collaboration with the Italian National Society of Ecology (S.It.E.), the Editorial Group ‘L’Espresso’ and other partners. EcoLogicaCup is the first national on-line competition on ecology in Italy, really a game in which students study, practice and finally play a final competition on ecological subjects. Here, we report some details of this initiative and the results about the previous editions. On national scale, EcoLogicaCup achieved excellent results in terms of participating schools and teams and met a remarkable success, on international scale, in terms of website users and visitors.