2016

Make a Game and Win the Forest Olympiad Contest

Each year, JSC “Latvia’s State Forests” (LVM) invites school-age students to participate in Mammadaba (Mother Nature) Master Class and Forest Olympiad. This year 7th-9th-grade students have a chance to compete with the best idea of an outdoor learning game, with the main prize – an expedition abroad for the whole team. Applications are open until November 30.

The task for the participants of the LVM Forest Olympiad is to create a new outdoor learning game about the forest and take a video of playing it outdoors with classmates. It can take place in a school yard, park, forest, botanical garden – wherever participants want to play it. The only thing that must be kept in mind – natural materials must be involved. The team should describe the rules of the game and record a one-minute long video instruction, which shows the process of the game.

The team must register the outdoor learning game rules and add a link to the video instruction. Competition guidelines and application form.

The contest jury will evaluate submitted games and the best 30 teams will be announced in the LVM school program Facebook page “Izzini mežu, Latvija” (Latvia, Learn about Forests) on February 1. Here until February 20 everybody will be able to vote for their favourite games, by clicking the “Like” button under the videos.

LVM Forest Olympiad is organized by LVM in cooperation with the National Centre for Education (NCE), to popularize creative and healthy education process outdoors in the schools of Latvia, as well as to raise awareness of Latvia’s largest renewable resource – forest among young people.

As emphasised by Inese Liepiņa, Environmental Education Specialist at the NCE, LVM Forest Olympiad is an opportunity to continue the activities within the environmental contest “Learning about Environment!”: “Since the traditional environmental education contest is not organised in the same way as before, we will encourage students to participate in the LVM Forest Olympiad, which is a new and fun way how to involve youth in environmental education”.