It’s the middle of Peek offseason when no students are out following field trips. Yet in those dark short days, we’re approached by a small team of researchers from southern France who are dreaming up an inspiring summer excursion in the Mediterranean seaside town of Balaruc. Fast-forward 1.5 years later, and this trip is elected as the Peek Excursion of the Year 2024 🏆.
This award-winning trip by CHARM-EU (CHallenge-driven, Accessible, Research-based, Mobile European University) offers some inspiring lessons about trip design. Let’s hear from one of the Balaruc trip-designers Dr. Ádám Tóth about their recipe!
“I think our secret is combining different kind of questions: not only focussing on scientific content, but also on team building and including multi-cultural aspects” – Ádám
MOXMO: international students visit the town(s?) of Balaruc
The annual MOXMO (Montpellier Cross-thematic Mobility) week provides a 12-day exchange that involves students from different disciplines and countries. In the summer of 2023 and 2024, over 100 international CHARM-EU students explored the historical Mediterranean port town of Balaruc. Students explored the town using the Peek app with diverse scopes of biodiversity, economy, history and culture. Balaruc provides an interesting study case, given historical tensions between the old village (Balaruc-le-Vieux) which was primarily agricultural and less affluent, and the thermal area (Balaruc-les-Bains) which attracted wealthy bourgeoisie from across Europe for centuries. The students looked at these challenges and how to develop sustainable solutions for water resources management and land planning.
Diverse questions
Aside from the complex environmental and societal challenges, Ádám and his fellow professors Vanessa Vigano and Roland Thaler made sure that all students would get to know France a little better! From Daft Punk to Coco Chanel – from Asterix to Napoleon – and from fresh seaweeds to the pungent Vieux-Boulogne cheese.
Team-building
The Peek trip was also used to add to the team-building element of this exchange programme.
This question is a good example of how Ádám & co combined cultural exchange and group engagement in the app!
Students as true mime (or meme?) artists
The French trip designers quickly grasped how photo-assignment can really trigger student creativity, and managed to apply this quite successfully. Their strategy was so effective, in fact, that some students took their mimes (or should we say memes?) to the next level…
Here the question was quite simple: ‘Please upload here a picture of a Zostera seagrass or a Posidonia plant‘
He really went for it!
Unsolved till this day: these students were meant to show the “millefeuille” effect that is used to describe the layered French administration (although called after the more digestible French cake made of alternating layers of pastry)…
Instructions unclear: apparently this is what you get when you ask for a picture of the locals with their permission.
The group of international students clearly enjoyed their Peek tour in Balaruc. If the pictures weren’t enough proof of that, they confirmed this in a brief evaluation form after the trip. Inspiring!
