The tiger mosquito education project is one of the areas of action of the Programme for the Surveillance, Monitoring and Control of the Mosquito Tiger. It aims to involve children in year 5 of primary education (10-11 years old) in the Girona area in combating the spread of the tiger mosquito.
The project is split into two parts:
The first part of the project comprises talks-workshops offered by the Mosquito Control Service in the participating schools. Children learn about the mosquito tiger, its life cycle, the environments most favourable to its development and how to prevent its reproduction. They also find out how to identify the adult insect and its larvae, as well as discovering the measures that must be taken to prevent the spread of the insect.
The second stage of the project is the field study. Each pupil is given an entomological kit with all the material necessary for collecting mosquito samples and mosquito larvae from the habitual environments. Teachers then send this material to the Mosquito Control Service, which analyses the samples and informs the school of the results. The data obtained also serves to expand the information obtained by the service through periodical controls.
The main goal of the project is to raise awareness among the population of the impact of the tiger mosquito on people’s health and on the environment, and to provide tools in order to prevent its reproduction. The education activity carried out in schools also involves the adult population; children pass on the knowledge they have acquired to their parents and insist upon following the recommendations to prevent the tiger mosquito from laying its eggs. Furthermore, through the field study, adults take part in collecting samples, which means that they also become more aware of the risks of this mosquito and of how to prevent its spread. This awareness-raising task is crucial, since it is estimated that if each person took responsibility in their home for preventing the reproduction of the mosquito tiger, the insect’s survival rate would be reduced by 70%.
Since the first edition, the mosquito tiger education project has been rolled out across the province of Girona, with the participation of 6,000 pupils on average per edition.
You can see the information on the tiger mosquito given to children in the schools that take part in the education project by clicking on the image below (optimised for Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome).
Links to "Timmy i el Mosquit Tigre" on-line game:
This game is also hosted on these other servers (mirrors):
En Timmy i el Mosquit Tigre - Server 2
En Timmy i el Mosquit Tigre - Server 3
En Timmy i el Mosquit Tigre - Server 4
Descriptive video of the Tiger Mosquito Education Project:
Summer camps proposal:
