The FarmLife Education Box is an innovative, interdisciplinary teaching concept – not just for agricultural schools!
General
Agriculture should be as climate-friendly and environmentally sound as possible. At the same time, farmers must constantly adapt their farm management to the current climate situation. Success requires considerable expertise and intuition.
FarmLife has established itself in recent years as a practical farm management tool for assessing the sustainability of agricultural operations on a farm-by-farm basis. It not only performs analysis and evaluation, but also offers a strengths and weaknesses analysis and actionable recommendations based on this analysis.
This not only promotes the operational skills of farm managers, but also strengthens awareness both within the farm itself and externally – i.e., towards retailers and consumers. The key multiplier in this regard is the younger generation of potential farmers.
Main topics in the lessons
Understanding natural relationships and interactions resulting from human actions must be given a significant role in agricultural education.
Interdisciplinary focus areas on the following topics are suitable:
- ecology
- climate
- Environment and resource management
- biodiversity
- Sustainability assessment
The FarmLife Education Box and its website WWW.FARMLIFE.AT
The FarmLife Education Box offers a comprehensive and versatile package of teaching materials on the topics of environment and resource management, sustainability assessment in agriculture, and specific areas of the online tool, as well as engaging activity suggestions for lessons. Many of Austria's agricultural schools have already received the FarmLife Education Box – a wooden box containing a USB drive and the game FarmLife Tactics – and are using it to enrich lessons in a wide variety of subjects across the curriculum.
The farm management tool itself serves as the foundation for this educational concept. It has been adapted for ease of use in the classroom and is freely available to schools. The information button on the FarmLife homepage directs you to all the tools and materials for teaching FarmLife and also offers several short instructional videos. The flexibly applicable materials allow for independent use in different subjects within the curriculum and/or in interdisciplinary projects. A wide range of teaching methods and approaches are supported.
All updated FarmLife learning materials can be found on our ⇒ FarmLife learning platform!
Who benefits from FarmLife:
Didactic evaluation of the FarmLife educational concept
In the DaFNE project "Didactic Evaluation and Dissemination of the FarmLife Educational Concept," the FarmLife educational box underwent a didactic evaluation to verify whether it possesses the essential characteristics required for competency-oriented educational materials and tools intended for classroom use, and whether it can also be used across subjects. The presence of these fundamental prerequisites was confirmed. For complete details of the evaluation, which took place in autumn 2023, please refer to the full project final report.
The underlying projects were funded through the departmental research program via dafne.at with funds from the Federal Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry, Regions and Water Management. The Ministry supports applied, problem-oriented and practice-oriented research within its area of expertise.
