This interactive resource is an engaging crash course on climate change. It features three sections called "Climate Change," "Clean Energy," and "Towards a Sustainable Society."
At the end of the course, students take a final quiz and earn a certificate.
Teaching Tips
Positives
The course is designed in an exciting and motivating manner. It contains interludes of pictures, graphs, and short quizzes.
Additional Prerequisites
It is essential to carry out a thorough review beforehand to decide how to use this resource.
Some of the external links are publications that require a paid subscription to access.
Differentiation
If this resource is used before August 2022, Students between the ages of 12-25 can be encouraged to sign up for the ClimateScience Olympiad—a competition to brainstorm solutions to climate change.
Students can explore this interactive chartthat compares the per capita energy used by different countries.
For extensions in technology or physics class, students can be motivated to work on an innovative mini-project to generate a source of clean energy to power something in their school or neighborhood.
Scientist Notes
The resource highlights the climate system, energy balance, and human influence within the climate system. It is recommended for teaching.
Standards
Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS)
ESS3: Earth and Human Activity
MS-ESS3-3 Apply scientific principles to design a method for monitoring and minimizing a human impact on the environment.
MS-ESS3-5 Ask questions to clarify evidence of the factors that have caused the rise in global temperatures over the past century.
HS-ESS3-1 Construct an explanation based on evidence for how the availability of natural resources, occurrence of natural hazards, and changes in climate have influenced human activity.
HS-ESS3-5 Analyze geoscience data and the results from global climate models to make an evidence-based forecast of the current rate of global or regional climate change and associated future impacts to Earth systems.
