Principles

The Gaia Project has several principles that are central to our organization.

We believe that students learn best when engaged in doing. We call this Project Based Learning, where students are empowered to find a creative solution to a problem that has very little in the way of constraints. We want to students to be the ones setting goals, their direction, finding, recommending and implementing solutions within their schools, with the teacher acting as a facilitator in this process.

We also believe in what we call Realistic Environmentalism - which means that we need to be solution focused, and recognize that not every body wants to or can live a lifestyle with minimal impact. We need to present solutions that work from a technological, social, environmental and economic persepective in order to achieve this. 

With this in mind, all of our projects aim to incorporate three key principles symbolizing our focus on realistic environmentalism and project based learning:
 
1. Data-Informed Decisions – We want students to be able to explain why, and quantify the effect of each decision they made along the way to their final solution.
2. Economic Assessments – We expect students to be able to assess the cost effectiveness of their solutions, and be able to optimize their projects with limited budgets.
3. Environmental Impact and Lifecycle Assessments – We need students to take a holistic view to their projects by looking at the whole life cycle of their projects.