After launching our Food Security Debate Kit, we emailed all the 791 teachers who requested it, we followed up with reminder emails, letters and phone calls. This way we collected feedback from online surveys, mailing campaigns and phone conversations, we analysed it and wrote it all up in a report.

We have estimated that at least 35% of teachers had used the Food Security Debate Kit within five months from receiving it. Each kit was used with more than 3 classes on average, which means that over 800 classes have been discussing about Food Security using our debate kit. We were happy to find out that 60% of the teachers who haven’t yet used the kit said that they use it in the future, when it fits better with the curriculum.

Apart from the kits that were directly requested from teachers, 510 were sent to STEM Contract Holders, Global Food Security distributed 353 through different members of the organisation, and 275 were sent to teachers who took part in I’m a Scientist, Get me out of here! in November 2013.

The evaluation also revealed that all the teachers think that their students are now more aware that feeding the World is a complex and global issue. More in detail, 85% of the teachers said that their students are now better at identifying local and seasonal foods.

If you want to read the complete report, you can download it here:
Food Security Debate Kit Evaluation (PDF 1,3KB)

Debate kits keep proving themselves as a successful tool to engage students in debates around science topics. We are already sending out our new debate kit on the topic of Electricity Distribution, and a new kit on the topic of Big Data will be realised in June. Sign up and we’ll keep you posted on these!