Rethinking Environmental Learning for High-schools

As part of ASE's team, I contributed to the creation of an international award-winning virtual cave tour for educational outreach and led the redesign of the association’s website.

Summary

Contributed to user research through education workshops to understand how learners interact with cave systems and their environments.

Explored and documented multiple cave sites alongside speleologists and scanning teams to support content strategy for the virtual tour experience.

Redesigned the association’s website to make environmental resources more accessible for schools, educators, and the public.

2022

Overview

Asociația Speologică Exploratorii is a non-profit speleology organization dedicated to raising awareness about nature and environmental conservation while exploring karst regions and documenting them.

Timeline

Virtual Tour for Educational Purposes

Organization need

High school students often find geology content too technical or disengaging. For a non-profit focused on environmental education, this made it difficult to communicate the importance of karst environments in a way that was clear, accessible, and meaningful to young learners.

Goal

Design an engaging and accessible digital experience that helps high school students understand karst environments and encourages curiosity about geology — supporting the organization’s mission to educate and inspire.

Results

See the whole virtual experience here.

Discovery and Research

To establish learning patterns and understand how students engage with natural environments, we organized hands-on workshops with highschoolers.

Through these workshops I identified key themes and needs. It was clear that we needed a clear, engaging, and accurate experience without overwhelming users.

Getting familiar with educational tools

Q & A and theory workshops

Practical work-shops

Turning Reality into Virtual

We mapped the cave flow, built the interactive environment with the scanning team, and simplified content based on usability testing.

Organization need

The website was hard to navigate and packed with dense text, making it difficult for visitors—especially educators and potential volunteers—to find what they needed. As a result, 68% left within the first minute, leading to missed chances for engagement

Goal

Redesign the website into a clear and engaging platform that informs the public, supports the mission, and encourages volunteering.

Personal Challenge

Although the founder saw the need for improvement, he was deeply attached to the original website, having written most of it's content. Building trust through open communication, visual prototypes, and involving him in key decisions helped us move forward.

Improving the association's website

Results

Low fidelity designs

High fidelity designs