When elephants nodded and dolls spoke: Bringing together robotics and storytelling for environmental literacy Mukil M.V. AMMACHI Labs Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham Amritapuri, India mukil.mv@ammachilabs.org Gayathri Manikutty AMMACHI Labs Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham Amritapuri, India gayathrim@am.amrita.edu Divya Vijayan AMMACHI Labs Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham Amritapuri, India divya.vijayan@ammachilabs.org Aparna Rangudu AMMACHI Labs Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham Amritapuri, India aparna.rangudu@ammachilabs.org Rao R. Bhavani AMMACHI Labs Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham Amritapuri, India bhavani@am.amrita.edu ABSTRACT Inculcating principles of environmental stewardship among the children and youth is needed urgently today for creating a sustainable future. This paper presents a model for promoting environment literacy in India using story telling based workshops while focusing on STEM education including computational thinking, robotics and maker skills. During the workshop, participants build a robotic diorama with digital animations and animatronics to tell their story. Our initial observations from pilot studies conducted in 2019 in six rural and semi-urban schools in India showed us that the children were deeply engaged and enthusiastic throughout the workshop making the entire learning experience a very meaningful and joyful one for all. CCS CONCEPTS • Applied computing → Interactive learning environments; • Applied computing → Collaborative learning; • Social and professional topics → K-12 education; • Social and professional topics → Computational thinking KEYWORDS Experiential learning; 21st century skills; middle school education; co-creation; K-12 education; Robotics ACM Reference format: Mukil M.V., Gayathri Manikutty, Divya Vijayan, Aparna Rangudu, Rao R. Bhavani. 2019. When elephants nodded and dolls spoke: Bringing together robotics and storytelling for environment literacy. In Fablearn Asia 2020, January 10-12, 2020, Bangkok, Thailand. 4 pages. Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission from the authors. Fablearn Asia 2020, January 10-12, 2020, Bangkok, Thailand. © 2020 Copyright held by the owner/author(s) 1 Introduction The world today is facing unprecedented challenges such as climate change, food security, rapid technological advances, conflicts, and global health epidemics, which need to be dealt with both at global and local levels [1]. One cannot predict exactly how these challenges will compound over time and what severity levels will they attain in the next decade but, certainly, human’s environmental actions will have a central role in determining how safe our world would be for humans to live. Therefore children must be taught from an early age to think critically and reflect deeply about how each of our decisions and actions impact the environment and our daily lives [2]. Whereas environmental science has become an integral part of the K-12 curriculum in schools in India, there is a lot of emphasis on presenting factual data and little emphasis on bringing inter- disciplinary experiential learning into the classroom. Hence the learning becomes that of rote-learning with the child often missing the critical link between the subject and his/her daily life [3]. The primary objective of our research work was to introduce middle school children to experiential science and technology based learning for environment literacy using robotics and maker skills that is situated within the lives of the children. The secondary objective was to promote 21 st century skills of creativity, collaboration, communication and critical thinking for environment literacy. By the term environmental literacy we are referring to children developing knowledge and understanding of different environment problems, developing skills and motivations for spreading awareness on the issues that they empathize with and developing innovative solutions for the environmental problems they are championing [4, 5]. To be successful in this technological age, education must be such that it encourages youth to be creators of technology and not just consumers of technology [6]. Experiential learning of Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Mathematics (STEAM) subjects through robotics and maker skills could be one way to impart technology education. Our previous work with middle school children [7] and that done by our colleagues Sushmita et. al [8] highlighted that experiential learning through