Active teaching-learning methodology in a non-formal teaching environment as a tool to mitigate the "plant awareness disparity" in public school students.

Currently, a significant proportion of young people are discouraged by the teaching of botany and, consequently, show little interest in preserving local biodiversity. On the other hand, with the recurrent use of digital technologies (DTs), young people have shown significant interest in virtual devices. Our project's tested the hypothesis whether plants awareness disparity in public school students was overcome through active teaching and learning. Thus, the objective was to investigate the use of active methodology in a non-formal teaching environment (e.g., sensory garden, SG) in order to stimulate learning in plant organography based on its evaluation using digital games. Our proposal was investigated at the Lagoa do Sino campus (Buri/SP, Brazil) in partnership with the Public School System of the Municipality of Campina do Monte Alegre/SP, Brazil. Furthermore, students were divided into two teams, which applied qualitative methodologies, such as that one of these (Team A) had face-to-face contact with the SG, using the Problem-Based Learning (PBL) methodology, digital game and survey. Team B, on the other hand, will only have contact with the game. After collecting the data, we verified statistically significant differences between the teams using the Wilcoxon test and based on the latent traits evaluated. Given this, the literature points out that discouraging students influences their learning and, consequently, their education. In addition, our considerations are based on the latent trait knowledge of botany and, thus, we reject our null hypothesis and accept our alternative hypothesis. On the other hand, based on the latent trait of plant perception, we cannot affirm the acceptance or rejection of the hypotheses. It is worth noting that future studies should have a larger number of participants than this research in order to better evaluate what is intended.