Integrating Citizen Observatories into School Environmental Education for Sustainability: Design and Evaluation of a Case Study Engaging Students with Pl@Ntnet and Odourcollect

International audience ; Environmental Education for Sustainability (EEfS) seeks to facilitate people’s learning about environmental and sustainability issues, not only to enable the development of fundamental scientific concepts, content knowledge and skills for understanding and dealing with current environmental problems, but also to cultivate ecological values and foster diverse competences for a responsible and democratic participation into more sustainable futures. Citizen science also focuses on engaging people with science and community action over local and global environmental and sustainability issues and topics. Defined as work undertaken by, or within, citizen communities supported and moderated by scientists and other community stakeholders, citizen science aims to advance science, foster scientific literacy and research competences, encourage community engagement and empower people to join ongoing debates about these issues. Moreover, although education and learning are not among citizen science’s first and explicit goals, there are many inherent links between it and EEfS. However, we argue that despite the many commonalities shared by the two fields, the synergies between them remain largely unexplored. This is why the approach taken by Cos4Cloud, a European Horizon 2020 project, supports the need to better understand and promote integration between citizen science and EEfS through collaborative research, technological innovation and educational design and praxis.The project builds on Citizen Observatories (COs), i.e., technological platforms and tools that facilitate the development of citizen science projects, particularly those whose main objective is large-scale citizen participation, by digitally connecting citizens, supporting their observational competences and providing information flows. Among its ambitions is to develop a minimum viable ecosystem for participating COs and a set of co-designed services that will enable the networking of citizen observatories and provide a synergetic ...