For 30 years, CSERC staff has presented slide shows to schools and community groups across Central California – reaching over 155,000 participants. Those in-person programs (mostly for schools in the foothills and Central Valley) are now on hold due to the pandemic; but CSERC’s outreach to youth has soared over the past year -- beyond our wildest expectations.
CSERC staff still gives a limited number of zoom-type slide show programs to classes, but the vast majority of CSERC’s outreach comes from our educational games (like the one at right) on the CSERC website.
In 2020, analytics showed that 383,000 users came to the website. More than a 1/3 of a million visits went to CSERC’s online games for kids – an incredibly high number. Apparently, there aren’t many fun, basic, and informative educational games about nature available online, so teachers steer students to the CSERC website.
At the current time, CSERC’s website offers a Watershed Game, a Find the Wildlife game, and a Baby Wildlife Game that asks students to match baby animals to their parents. Then there are Backyard Wildlife, Build a Food Chain, and Match the Habitat. For adults as well as youth, there is the Bird Diets challenge to match the bird’s beak to its food. Where Do Birds Nest? shows why different birds pick different nest locations. And Whose Tracks are These? offers three different levels of difficulty to match tracks to the correct wildlife species.
In 2020 roughly 78,000 visits were made to CSERC’s Spanish language version of our site, where dedicated translator Heather Campbell provides the games in Spanish and also translates CSERC website news, newsletters, updates, and articles.
With so many website visits, CSERC hopes to be planting seeds of awareness that will grow to lead each young visitor to care a little more about protecting our natural world.
