“Your work is just; I thank both you and your program for appreciating my children’s efforts and for not being afraid of our conditions… this is a very big thing for us,” says Vahram Grigoryan, the principal of the only school in the “flowing” village, with restrained emotion.

In Voghjaberd, classes for the school’s 104 students are held in container-sheds, right next to the abandoned and crumbling former school. “No one knows or understands the village’s problems better than we do. When we learned about the project competition program of the Visual Armenia Development Foundation, we decided to participate as well,” recalls Alisa Tandaryan, the project group leader and geography teacher. The creative team had no alternative in choosing the topic: “My WORLDVIEW: Mapping the Issues of Voghjaberd.” “The project is timely. Our aim was to once again inform the public about the urgency of taking preventive measures against landslide activation,” the students note, complementing each other.

Securing the smart-board in the container-classroom was not an easy task. The principal and his students hastily gathered all the necessary mounting accessories and, together with the technical team, set about equipping their newly earned educational technology in the room.

The project team consisted of 10 students from the 7th, 9th, and 10th grades, who were divided into geologists, cartographers, education sector representatives, and journalists based on their abilities. With the help of geography, social studies, and history teachers, they studied the village’s history and current issues, developing communication, research, and analytical skills. With the support of their ICT teacher, they applied ICT tools for data analysis and media content creation.

As a final result of their project work, they created an informational poster and booklet with proposals for long-term preventive measures against landslides. “To manage surface water flows in a landslide-prone area, it is possible to create a surface drainage system (diversion ditches), implement modern drip irrigation systems to avoid saturating the community’s agricultural lands, conduct regular tree planting, and use irrigation water conservatively,” say our students, who have become “experts” on the issue as a result of their project.