Connie Sebati, CCB's communications officer, attended a Circle of Inquiry Workshop in Moreomaoto village from the 21st - 25th May 2012. The main objective of the workshop was to train environmental educators in Botswana how to use the Circle of Inquiry education method and become better facilitators of learning through nature. Inquiry based learning focuses on the process of students asking and answering questions through direct experience, rather than the teacher transmitting information by providing answers to his/her own questions. Through inquiry, students are able to discover and construct their own knowledge through observation skills, curiosity, inquiry, measure variables, data processing, visual presentation of data collected and collective reflection. All this leads to making learning interesting, inspiring and relevant. The workshop was organised by Elephants for Africa (Dr. Kate Evans) and Chicago Zoological Society represented by Dr. Ricardo Stanoss, the workshop facilitator.

It has been an exciting week with the arrival of the National Geographic Crittercam representative. CCB has six Crittercam collars which will be fitted to a cheetah for two days to collect footage of how cheetahs move through their environment and interact with each other.

CCB set up traps on Dare Qare Game Farm owned by the Kalahari San people. We caught two male cheetah brothers the first day, fitted a collar on one and re-released them. We then caught a female cheetah with a couple of full grown cubs on Friday, collared and released her. We picked up the first collar from the male on Saturday morning, as planned. There is some wonderful footage of them drinking at a pan, grooming and walking through the veld. As well as lots of footage of them sleeping!

We are now searching for the second collar and are continuing the cheetah trapping effort with a view to fitting six collars in total. This is the first time such video footage has been collected from wild cheetah and we are very excited to a part of such an innovative initiative! Thanks to National Geographic for working with CCB, also thanks to SPOTS for sponsoring one of the collars. We look forward to sharing the outcomes soon!