Balboa Park Alive aims to foster care for our region’s biodiversity by promoting ecological literacy in youth and families. We will develop an e-book and a series of companion augmented reality (AR) installations (accessed through phone app) exploring various locations of Balboa Park.  The e-book will be composed of eight sections, each exploring a different set of interconnections between elements of the Park’s natural life in the context of climate change, environmental justice, and indigenous knowledge about the natural world and land stewardship. The framing activity for the installations will be an audio AR scavenger hunt that guides firsthand perceptual and kinesthetic exploration through different pockets of natural life explored in the e-book–from lizards of the Cactus Garden and birds that depend on the Moreton Bay fig tree, to bees of the Rose Garden and butterflies and hummingbirds of the Zoro Garden.  It is hoped that these types of experiences will foster curiosity and empathy towards the plants and animals of the San Diego region, inspiring action in support of conservation and climate change reversal.  At the same time, this project offers families and others a shared activity that motivates conversation and outdoor exploration.  By closely interweaving place-based AR with conventional printed materials, this project will yield a novel and potentially transformative approach to fostering literacy in environmental science.

Publication status: ONGOING