BC Green Games is Science World’s eco-action storytelling contest for schools, K–12. Since 2009, participants and collaborators have been blazing the trail for place-based, inquiry/project-style education. With over 800 eco-action projects archived, students and teachers from all over BC have not only inspired action in schools across the province, they've demonstrated how important it is to take action, tell their story and share environmental education.
What is a BC Green Games Project?
A successful project can be as straightforward as establishing recycling programs for your school or class, or as involved as building a year-round geodesic greenhouse. Last year, the Bottles to Trees project from Venables Valley included the creation and organization of a beverage-container recycling centre for their whole community. The team collected and delivered refundable containers to the nearest Return-It recycling centre, where they helped the Encorp team there sort out the containers. They used the money from refundables to plant fruit trees at their community centre!
Last year’s BC Hydro Prize winner was also from Venables Valley. The Forever Green project really took the cake when they managed to save their entire school from closing its doors by going completely off-grid. You read that right. With the help of a local alternative power company, and their community, they found they best way to harness natural energy sources in their area. Since the school is nearby to a creek, they found that a micro hydro water turbine met 100% of their energy needs!
Strathcona Elementary School in Chilliwack inspired a national movement when one of our judges shared their dead pens project with schools in Quebec. Their project was a creative way to tell the story of how important it is to recycle spent pens and markers. They created cardboard coffins for them and placing them around the school to remind people to collect them and the coffins also acted as a display for how much waste these writing utensils created. They had a goal of 250 pens for the February deadline, but ended up collecting nearly 3,000 pens!
The Dead Pen Recycling project did such a great job of creating change and telling a story that it is being reproduced in other schools!
New field trip opportunities for year 8!
As we get ready to welcome year 8 of the program, we are excited to share our Community Coaches, resources and curriculum connections with teachers. In years past we have hosted hundreds of free Science World field trips for participating BC Green Games teams.
We are so pleased to announce that the coveted Return-It Trip prize, will be back this year. The Return-It Trip, courtesy of our sponsors at Encorp Pacific, made it possible for teams who chose Return-It Schools as a Community Coach to win a travel subsidy of up to $3,000. Last year's prize was split between our Venables Valley team and our team from Nakusp elementary. This made it possible for both teams to make the journey to TELUS World of Science in Vancouver to attend their BC Green Games certificate ceremony and explore the science centre.
This year, we are putting an even larger focus on outreach by inviting our fellow BC science centers to join the BC Green Games fun! With their collaboration on local celebrations, more BC students will be able to attend BC Green Games celebrations than ever before!