The non-profit organization Friends of the University of Bonn Botanic Gardens, which has a wealth of experience in communicating ‘green’ and flora research topics to the public, has been successfully operating the Green School for many years now. The School organizes guided tours of the Poppelsdorfer Palace Gardens, the crop garden and the Melbgarten park grounds in the Melb valley to educate people on the diversity of plant life in the region.
Now the available offerings are being expanded for the benefit of younger visitors to the gardens through opening of the Green Learning Workshop, where school classes and kindergartens, for example, can go on a field day to learn about and experience plant diversity in hands-on fashion, with dedicated rooms for working on their own special projects. Kids can do experiments, build models, and show and talk about their work results together, gaining insights into methods of scientific inquiry at an early age, through direct experience.
“The Learning Workshop is a terrific project for educating young people about biology. Kids and teens get to experience biodiversity through multi-sensory exhibits that really make science tangible. “I am extremely pleased how the work of the Green School can now be so greatly expanded through the addition of these new facilities,” said Professor Maximilian Weigend, who is Director of the Botanic Gardens.
The Learning Workshop at the Green School is intended to further promote early science education, complementing existing offerings within the Bonn educational landscape as a place of extracurricular learning. Funding for learning materials, professional workshop equipment and a full renovation including barrier-free accessibility, was provided by the University Foundation, the University of Bonn and a host of sponsors.
As University of Bonn Rector Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. Michael Hoch commented, “Our express strategy is to get young people excited about science and the goings-on at the University at as early an age as possible, partly in order to uncover and foster talent by the best means possible. The FFF youth study program and our ‘Young University’ —successful initiatives established for many years now— are now being flanked by the Green Learning Workshop as another key offering.”
Prof. Dr. Rainer Hüttemann, chairperson of the University of Bonn Foundation, emphasized the importance of the project for the Foundation: “When we celebrated our 10th anniversary in 2019 we earmarked priority funding for this purpose. The funding for the Learning Workshop, thus conceived as an anniversary project, has been of special significance to me, as this is the first project we have funded that is for the benefit of schoolchildren.”
A very large part of the funds for fitting out the Green Learning Workshop came from the Evonik Foundation, whose Managing Director, Dr. Heike Bergandt, had this to say in praise of the concept: “The Green Learning Workshop meets all the criteria for receiving funding from us, because our foundation is focused on promoting young talent in the STEM subjects. We recognize that a good education is the key to innovation, sustainability and technological advancement. And that includes getting children excited about many different subjects to study at an early age.”