Wild Eyes Episode 2: Bird Cafe. Wild Eyes is a free NZ website that provides awesome digital rewards to kids for completing fun backyard nature missions. Wild Eyes missions are designed to be completed at home or in a classroom and are perfect for weekend or holiday activities. Funded by NZ On Air, MBIE's Nation of Curious Minds and UNESCO.
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Thanks to Covid-19, cabin fever is in the curriculum for primary and intermediate school kids and their parents. Keeping Kiwi kids active, curious (and awake!) during lockdown is a serious daily challenge.
This week the Herald in partnership with Wild Eyes presents a series of fun, inspirational missions to getNZ kids in lockdown off screens and outside to engage in nature.
In our second episode Christian and Nova make their backyards rule by building a wild bird cafe (bird feeder) that'll be tweeted about by the tūi.
Check out our Bird Cafe episode above to find out more. And for other wild ideas or to share photos of your kids' amazing efforts go to wildeyes.co.nz
The Wild Eyes video series was made possible as part of an emergency $700,000 funding round launched by NZ On Air, which this week gave the green light to nine new projects created in lockdown, at a time the local production sector has come to a grinding halt.
Chief executive Cameron Harland said the response to NZ On Air's call for applications on April 1 was extraordinary.
"We received 112 applications seeking $5.6m in funding. We had set aside $400,000. The quality of the proposals, the range of ideas and creatives involved, and the support of the commercial platforms for the initiative has been remarkable."
In response to the flood of excellent project ideas, NZ On Air was able to reallocate some funding previously allocated but no longer required and increase the pot to a fraction over $700,000.
Clementine and Quillan Cole, aged 7 and 4, show off their new bird feeder. Photo / supplied
If you're a parent or teacher wanting to know more about the Wild Eyes project, here's some information from the website.
About the site
Wild Eyes is a new website that aims to get Kiwi kids off screens and connected with NZ nature, science and the environment … using screens!
Wild Eyes provides awesome digital incentives to Kiwi kids for completing fun nature missions. The missions are designed to be completed at home or at school, and are perfect for weekend, backyard, or holiday activities; for inquiry learning, LOTC and post-site visit environmental engagement.
On the Wild Eyes site users set up a profile, pick a Wild Eyes mission, complete the mission and upload a photo of the completed activity to the site. Completed missions earn users digital rewards e.g. new sets of wild eyes for their profile avatar, and tawaki penguin emoji likes from other users.
The idea is that kids inspire other kids. All photo uploads are moderated before publication on the site and users can choose to publish their photo uploads publicly, or keep them private.
The Herald will release a new episode of Wild Eyes each day around lunchtime.
