Prof. Geeta Gandhi Kingdon, CMS Manager and Chief Convenor of Eureka 2025

The Ripple Effect: How School Environmental Science Turns Curiosity into Household Action — Eureka 2025

Education that stops at the classroom wall is incomplete. When children learn by doing, the learning travels home.

At CMS, we emphasise hands-on Experiential Learning Projects (ELP) and Project-Based Learning (PBL) that connect classroom knowledge to real-world problems and believe sustainability is a practice, not a theory. This philosophy is embedded in the DNA of our upcoming 13th Eureka International Science and Environment Olympiad (EISEO 2025). The event’s competitions are meticulously designed to embody the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), creating a direct link between student innovation and global priorities.

For instance, the ‘Touch My Shadow’ multimedia competition for juniors challenges participants to connect their digital creations with global objectives, explicitly requiring them to identify the SDGs their project supports. The ‘Inventors Galore’ event for senior students, with its theme “Communities in Harmony: Crafting Sustainable Living Environments,” directly engages with SDG 11 (Sustainable Cities and Communities). Similarly, ‘Eco Merchants’ for primary students promotes responsible consumption (SDG 12) by having them design advertisements for eco-friendly products, while ‘Eco-Art’ advocates for climate action (SDG 13) through creations made from recycled materials. This is climate action in schools in its most tangible form, aligning our educational pillars—the 6Cs: Character, Citizenship, Collaboration, Communication, Creativity and Critical Thinking—with the world’s most pressing needs. The recent Living Planet Report, released in October 2024, reveals that humanity is overusing Earth’s resources by 75%, effectively consuming the equivalent of 1.75 planets. This indicates that our consumption of natural resources is occurring significantly faster than the planet can replenish them1.

This experiential learning creates a tangible household impact. Students do not simply complete projects; they bring home new perspectives. A child who constructs a working model of a water purification system or passionately advocates for waste segregation becomes an agent of change within their family. Households transform into micro-laboratories of change, adopting practices like energy conservation, reduced plastic use, and sustainable shopping. A 2024 study by Elsevier’s Sustainable Production and Consumption journal found that students engaged in project-based environmental learning influenced an average of 8-10 household sustainability behaviours2. Through children, we transform family practices into sustainable norms, creating a multiplier effect where each participant influences their immediate circle, amplifying the ripple effect of environmental science school education.

Three ways school programmes create household ripple effects:

  1. Knowledge to practice — Experiential environmental education increases student knowledge and leads to observable household behaviour change. Recent peer-reviewed studies show that school-based environmental programmes significantly raise students’ environmental understanding and can lead to measurable changes in family practices such as water conservation and waste segregation3.
  2. Student agency as multiplier — Children function as agents of change. Reviews of pro-environmental behaviour find consistent evidence that children’s attitudes and behaviours influence parental practices, turning a single classroom into dozens of informed households. This multiplier effect is a predictable outcome when schools prioritise hands-on projects4.
  3. Structured challenges that map to global goals — EISEO 2025 consciously aligns student-led competitions with UN Sustainable Development Goals: SDG 9 (industry, innovation and infrastructure), SDG 11 (sustainable cities and communities), SDG 12 (responsible consumption) and SDG 13 (climate action). Each event — from Eco-Merchants to Inventors Galore — requires participants to design solutions that are usable at home and scalable in communities. This alignment turns local experiments into contributions to international objectives.

Our distinguished alumnus and Astronaut Shubhanshu Shukla’s journey is a beacon of this potential. His formative years at CMS were steeped in a culture of inquiry and opportunities like EISEO, which cultivate a mindset of innovative problem-solving. He is living proof that nurturing curiosity leads to cosmic contributions. Every astronaut was once a schoolchild whose questions were encouraged. His story demonstrates how local education, focused on global citizenship and empathy, can fuel global discovery and leadership.

This is why events like the Eureka International Science and Environment Olympiad 2025 matter in their long-term impact on the minds of the future of tomorrow, our students, who acquire skills that are directly transferable to family decision-making and community action. The student participants move beyond mere competition to become catalysts for actionable solutions and launchpads for future scientists and climate leaders. As the world’s largest school, recognised by Guinness World Records, CMS leads by example, proving that large-scale education can be purpose-driven and transformative. EISEO is not simply a competition but a catalyst that operationalises this world-embracing vision through engaging students to do more than replicate experiments: they evaluate trade-offs, engage peers and advocate for better practices at home and in their neighbourhoods. The result is durable behaviour change, not one-off demonstrations.

Our Founder Manager, the late Dr Jagdish Gandhi, wisely stated that we are “trustees, or stewards, of the planet’s vast resources.” He urged that as global citizens we need to “learn to make use of the earth’s natural resources… in a manner that ensures sustainability and equity into the distant reaches of time.” EISEO 2025 is a living embodiment of this mantra. It equips students to be those informed stewards. If educators, parents and policymakers want measurable household shifts in waste, water and energy practices, let us answer the call for experiential environmental learning programmes that require students to design, test and scale solutions.

Conclusion

The true value of education is its ripple effect. From a school project to a household habit, from a classroom prototype to a community solution — the pathway is direct and measurable. EISEO 2025 provides that pathway. We urge educators, parents, and policymakers to participate in CMS’s Eureka International Science and Environment Olympiad (EISEO) 2025 not as a standalone event, but as a vital movement. Curiosity becomes impact at EISEO. Join us from 14th to 17th October 2025 to amplify this ripple into a wave of sustainable progress.

References:

  1. World Wildlife Fund (2024). Living Planet Report 2024. Gland, Switzerland: WWF.
  2. Chen, P., Guo, J., & Zhang, H. (2024). Incorporating creative problem-solving skills to foster project-based environmental learning: Evidence from graduate student households. Sustainable Production and Consumption, 45, 176–188
  3. Husin, A., Nengsih, Y. K., & Helmi, H. (2025). The Impact of Environmental Education on Intergenerational Knowledge Transfer and Household Behaviour: A Quantitative Study from Palembang. International Journal of Environmental Impacts, 8(1), 33–40.
  4. Liu J, Liu P, Williams CM, Zhong W, Robertson J, & Li K. (2024). Children’s pro-environmental behaviour: A systematic review of the literature. Environmental Education Research, 97, 102097.
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