The Tisza Competition – A Regional Academic Contest Related to the Environmental Hazards of a Hungarian River

The most important watercourse of the Hungarian Great Plain is the Tisza River, which rises in the Carpathians and flows into the Danube at Titel. As the longest tributary of the Danube, it connects Ukraine, Romania, Hungary, Slovakia, and Serbia. For centuries, the river fundamentally shaped the landscape, the location and character of settlements, and local forms of land use. Prior to river regulation, floodplain management adapted to the Tisza’s natural hydrological regime provided predictable water supply for agriculture and ensured abundant fish resources for local communities. Following the river regulation works carried out at the end of the nineteenth century, the landscape underwent significant transformation: the cutoff of meanders, confinement of the river between embankments, and narrowing of floodplains altered the regional water balance. The river’s increased gradient and erosive capacity have led to channel incision along several sections, contributing to the further decline of the already low groundwater levels of the Great Plain, a region frequently affected by drought. These processes have adverse impacts on agriculture and the regional microclimate. In recent years, increasing emphasis has been placed on the need to retain water within the landscape rather than rapidly draining it, particularly in the context of drought adaptation.

The Szeged Regional Natural Science Student Laboratory, operating at the SZTE Báthory István Practicing Secondary and Primary School, organizes the Tisza Competition annually with the aim of raising awareness among students aged 9–12 about the importance of water as a natural resource, as well as introducing the natural values and environmental challenges associated with the Tisza River. Each school year, the competition is structured around a focal theme; in the 2025-2026 academic year, the central topic is the role of water retention along the Tisza in adaptation to drought. During the two-round competition, students deepened their knowledge, shaped their attitudes, and developed operations of scientific thinking through creative production and data-collection activities. In the first round, in addition to solving quiz tasks related to the geography and natural hazards of the Tisza, students created mind maps illustrating the positive effects of floodplain management and constructed a physical model of no more than A3 size to present the key characteristics of the Tisza landscape prior to river regulation. The submitted works were exhibited by the jury at the final round. The interactive tasks of the final round also focused on water retention, with particular emphasis on the application of map use and map-reading skills.

Through these activities, the Tisza Competition can be interpreted as a complex school-based project that strengthens students’ attachment to their local environment and, by building on active student participation, effectively contributes to the development of knowledge-based, environmentally conscious thinking and behaviour.

The MTA-SZTE Research Group on Geography Teaching and Learning is funded by the Research Programme for Public Education Development of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences for the period 2022-25.