The story so far

A moment ago I sent an email to another potential teacher-informant. I ended up summarising my current thinking on my research, and I figure it might be helpful to post this more widely to keep you readers up to date. Here'r are the important bits:

I'm interested in how students (say grade 10, for now) understand climate change and climate processes, and how these things can be taught. My intuition is that a visual, interactive process works best, and being a computer scientist an educational computational climate model is what comes to mind.

In my head I keep revising a possible piece of software to build -- though I'm not stuck on building software, of course -- as a teaching tool. At first I figured a simplified climate model that students could tweak parameters on might be useful. Recently I've started to think about providing a laboratory for creating climate models. The idea being that students could build their conceptual model of how the climate works and then execute it to see what the results are on temperature, carbon concentration, etc.. Then, by comparing their model's outputs with historical observations of climate (or maybe with correct model outputs) they could adjust their model. Through this process they'd learn about climate processes in a less didactic fashion, but maybe more compellingly?

Of course, I'm just a fellow concerned about climate change, able to build software, and interested in cognitive models and education [because I believe early education will have great impact]. I don't know a thing about the educational side of things: what makes a compelling interface for students or how much that matters, what gaps there are in the current teaching methods or student knowledge, and how to judge the usefulness of the various ideas I think up.

Part of moving past this is a matter of finding existing research. I've been combing the literature and internet for examples of educational climate models and research on them, but also for some background on climate education, visualisation, and the research coming out of other CS/education projects. There is plenty out there, of course. I'm tracking some of my thinking and discoveries on my blog, my Delicious bookmarks, and my citeulike paper library, if you're interested.

Besides the literature, I'm also interested in finding teachers with whom I can talk to in order to ground my thinking -- to make sure I'm working on a problem that actually exists and in a way that is actually useful. That's where you come in...

I didn't mention, but should have, the serendipity, and opportunity it affords, of the next years' Ontario curriculum exchanging the weather unit with one on climate change.