In 2024, the online course “How To Teach Mine Safety To Children” built a strong community of educators, State Emergency Service representatives, and National Police officers who promote mine safety rules among children and teenagers following international standards.
According to the socio-ecological model, the most practical approach in mine safety education, it is essential to consider all the interconnected influences on a child’s environment to ensure sustainable behavior change. Thus, rescuers, police officers, and teachers are the key specialists within communities entrusted with a crucial mission: to foster safe behavior among children and teenagers in the face of extensive landmine contamination across Ukraine (approximately 30% of its territory).
Every day, this network of EORE professionals grows and expands. The course remains highly relevant, with new participants continuously joining a nationwide community of mine safety ambassadors!
Protecting children within dangerous landscapes
Explosive ordnance risk education (EORE), now essential for Ukraine, is not just an extracurricular lesson or a behavioral briefing—it is an investment into saving lives and developing critical safety skills in children and teenagers who learn to act cautiously and avoid taking life-threatening risks out of curiosity. Due to the consequences of war, Ukrainian children not only face contaminated landscapes but also lose the ability to safely interact with their environment, maintain healthy development, or feel safe in familiar places.
In these challenging realities, mine safety education becomes a vital element in protecting a new generation of Ukrainians who are forced to endure traumatic experiences that severely impact their physical and mental well-being. Protecting childhood was, in fact, a key topic at the 2024 Summit of First Ladies and Gentlemen.
At the Summit, the Cultural Platform presented the exhibition “Following the Steppes: From the Crimean Slopes To the Luhansk Expanses”. 5 Ukrainian natural reserves—5 pavilions, where we presented artifacts made by contemporary Ukrainian artists as well as videos, artworks, and music created by the Ukrainian youth. Through revealing the interconnections between young people and nature, each artifact mirrors the societal change we experience as a result of ecological challenges.
More On the “How To Teach Mine Safety To Children” Online Course
As part of shaping safety culture as a worldview ecosystem, Cultural Platfrom Zakarpattya NGO developed and launched a free explosive ordnance risk education course at the end of 2023 with the support of UNICEF Ukraine.
The “How To Teach Mine Safety To Children” online course at courses.bezpeka.info is a compilation of three educational modules for teachers, rescuers, and police officers focusing on safe, effective, and interactive principles for teaching mine safety to children.
The key aspect of mine safety education for children is that it must not introduce new risks—such as causing anxiety, stress reactions, or triggering unnecessary interest. Therefore, the professionals involved in teaching mine safety must approach it carefully, providing only the essential knowledge through effective tools. This is the core objective of the “How To Teach Mine Safety To Children” online course. The latter aligns with international standards and offers guidance on what to teach and how to teach it, taking into account the children’s age, their specific educational needs, and the format of the lesson.
The “How To Teach Mine Safety To Children” online course was created in partnership with the Ministry of Education and Science, the Ministry of Internal Affairs, and The State Emergency Service. The key speakers are experts in their respective fields and the course is recommended by the Methodology Council of the Ukrainian Institute of Education Development offering 1 ECTS credit to all teachers who complete their studies.
Statistics
During 2024, more than 15 000 participants have registered for the “How To Teach Mine Safety To Children” course. Over 7000 of them successfully passed the final testing and obtained their certificates.
The highest number of online course participants come from the Zaporizhzhia, Dnipropetrovsk, Kharkiv, Kherson, and Mykolaiv regions.
All course materials are adapted not only for offline but also for online learning, thus helping to spread safety knowledge to children even in the most heavily mined regions—effectively, meaningfully, and engagingly.
Useful Materials
The EORE online course keeps growing into a whole system. Apart from the educational modules, now the platform also includes:
- a methodology manual on mine education theory that meets international teaching standards;
- a lesson constructor that helps create a convenient lesson plan for students in grades 1–4 or 5–11.
Safety Lessons
In 2024, the certified participants conducted at least 357 lessons on mine safety education using the knowledge and skills obtained at the online course. That is the exact number of completed lesson reports submitted to the course platform.
Competition For Educators
From November 13 to December 31, educators who completed the online course “How To Teach Mine Safety To Children” and conducted lessons based on the knowledge and skills gained, had the chance to participate in a competition organized by the Cultural Platform—and win a laptop for their schoolwork.
Around 300 educators took part, enabling several thousand Ukrainian children to learn how to protect themselves from explosive ordnance. The winner was selected randomly from applications that met the official competition rules—namely, Olha Hryhorevska, a teacher from the Dnipropetrovsk region, who conducted a lesson for 2nd-grade students at the Petropavlivskyi Lyceum No. 2 in the Petropavlivska amalgamated territorial community.
As a result of moderating the competition applications, 80% of teachers were able to comprehensively cover the topic of mine safety, as recommended by the experts of the online course on courses.bezpeka.info, and use safety materials developed and recommended by UNICEF during their lessons.
Participant Feedback
Since the launch of the online course, we have received thousands of feedback responses from participants. The most frequently mentioned highlights are the content depth and practical value of the educational materials, as well as the interactive format—a combination of short video lectures, lesson plans, and quizzes.
The team behind the “How To Teach Mine Safety To Children” online course is already developing new modules and video materials based on participant feedback and is continuously improving the testing process.
If you are an educator, a representative of the State Emergency Service or the National Police, and want to spread mine safety education in your community, register on the website bezpeka.info, complete the training, and teach young people—safely, effectively, and clearly.
In 2025, thanks to the online course, we are planning to collaborate with even more mine safety ambassadors to shape the safety culture and make safe behavior trendy together!
Olena Smirnova-Kochetkova
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