With this tool, people with reduced mobility or with difficulties to move to the aquarium can enjoy the space and its animals. They are very useful for people with partial loss of sight as they can zoom and focus the image.

Duration of the session: 1 hour

Number of participants: min. 6 max. 12

Objectives:

Objectives of this activity is to give trainers the opportunity:

To know interesting and educational online tools
To be able to use such applications
To work in an online team
To raising awareness of marine animal captivity

Materials:

Computer
Internet connection
Headphones

Description:

The first thing we will do is to connect to discord and divide the participants into several groups of 3 or 4 people (depending on the size of the group).

Exercise flow:

Each group will be given a document with a list of animals they have to find in the different habitats. The aquarium has the animals in different ponds and each animal has a name.

This list will have the name and a picture of the animal in question, the idea is that they will browse the web and find all the animals.

Clear Water Marine Aquarium: https://www.cmaquarium.org/webcams/winter-zone-cam-1/

Exercise course

Phase 1

First the facilitator will give you 5 minutes to enter a couple of ponds and familiarise yourself with how the website works.

Phase 2

Now that they know how the website works, the facilitator puts them in groups in different discord rooms so that they can talk without disturbing other groups and gives them the lists. They have to find all the animals on the list and take a picture of them.

Phase 3

When the participants have located all the animals on the list, they should find the following information about two of them, the ones they liked the most.

Age
Sex
Origin

Phase 4

They show the rest of the group which examples they liked best.

Then the facilitator asks them a couple of questions to get them to think about animals in captivity.

Have you seen any of these animals before?
Have you found information about the different species that you didn’t know about?
Do you think these animals we have seen are happy?
What do you think of their habitat?
How can we help these animals from home?
What can we do so that these animals do not have to end up in captivity?

Phase 5

Finally, each participant will use the photos of the animals we have looked for to make a montage or collage using paint.

Expected outcomes:

– They got to know the different marine species and their characteristics.

– They reflected on centres such as aquariums and zoos and on animals in captivity in general.

Annexes