The Barranquilla Zoo in Colombia underwent renovations with the help of the Chester Zoo to modernize exhibits and develop conservation education programs. They transformed cage exhibits to open green areas with vegetation and water features. They launched educational campaigns about spectacled bears and reducing parrot pets that involved workshops, booklets, and websites to teach thousands of students. Evaluations showed the campaigns successfully changed children's ideas about these topics. Further renovations included new exhibits with interactive learning devices to continuously improve conservation education.

1. A Conservation story

2. First: a quick trip to…

3. Colombian Biodiversity

4. The Barranquilla Zoo is a 53 year-old urban zoo 5 acres of size Holds more than 150 species and 450 individuals, 85% native to Colombia.

5. This is the story of how we went from… this To this

6. A few things our Old Zoo lacked of:

8. But we had a Plan : And a young team willing to carry out:

9. To exhibits So we went from cages

10. To green open areas From mesh enclosures

11. From concrete floors To vegetation and water

12. We still had to develop some conservation campaings So with the Master Plan runing …

13. So we look for people interested in sponsoring our projects. That’s how we met the Chester Zoo People We had many candidates (but not so much money)

14. The Bear Campaign

15. Design of a new exhibit with interactive devices for visitors

16. We designed a workshop for the Zoo visitors, in them, the facilitator presents the participants a series of closed questions based on the “Big Idea” of the campaign. The feedback of the answers is the key moment to offer information and to manage the key concepts of the program.

17. 3,000 educational booklets were printed to support the educational interactive talks and workshops. To this date all booklets have been handed out

18. A Mini-site of Spectacled Bear was created with a wide repertoire of information and interactive resources based on the “Big Idea” of this educational program.

19. Our second experience together was the “Parrot campaign”

20. The 2005-2006 educational campaign was oriented to reduce the use of parrots as pets in the city of Barranquilla.

21. 54 schools (180% of the goal and 10% of total in Barranquilla) implemented the educational program, representing 100% of the schools that attended the workshop sessions with their teachers. A total of 4,040 students (90% of the goal and 6% of total in Barranquilla) of these 54 schools participated in the program. A total of 82 sessions were developed in local schools (some schools had more than one session with different groups of students). The parrot campaign in numbers :

22. The evaluating method helped us understanding the change in children’s ideas about petting parrots.

23. A new Zoo exhibit with educative devices designed to evaluate visitors ideas Went from this… To this

24. And then… What’s next?