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This is the first of five lessons in the geoengineering lesson series. This lesson introduces a collaborative design thinking activity that guides students toward creating a geoengineering solution to mitigate climate change.
- Grade level
- Grades 6-12
- Materials
- 3 resources available
- Questions?
- Contact the lesson team
Overview
Objectives
By participating fully in this activity, students will:
- Learn the evidence of climate change and main contributions to climate change.
- Learn the concept of geoengineering as one of the solutions to mitigate climate change.
- Develop and practice collaboration skills.
- Develop and practice skills in design thinking.
Grade Level
Grades 6-12
Standards
- MS-ESS3-3 Earth and Human Activity. Apply scientific principles to design a method for monitoring and minimizing a human impact on the environment.
- MS-ESS3-5 Earth and Human Activity. Ask questions to clarify evidence of the factors that have caused the rise in global temperatures over the past century.
- HS-ETS1-1 Engineering Design. Analyze a major global challenge to specify qualitative and quantitative criteria and constraints for solutions that account for societal needs and wants.
- HS-LS2-7 Ecosystems: Interactions, Energy, and Dynamics. Design, evaluate, and refine a solution for reducing the impacts of human activities on the environment and biodiversity.
- HS-ESS3-1 Earth and Human Activity. 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-ESS2-2 Earth's Systems. Analyze geoscience data to make the claim that one change to Earth's surface can create feedbacks that cause changes to other Earth systems.
- HS-ESS3-4 Earth and Human Activity. Evaluate or refine a technological solution that reduces impacts of human activities on natural systems.
United Nations Sustainable Development Goals
- SD Goal 4: Quality Education: Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all.
- SD Goal 9: Industry, Innovation, and Infrastructure: Build resilient infrastructure, promote inclusive and sustainable industrialization, and foster innovation.
- SD Goal 13: Climate Action: Take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts.
Materials Required
- Collaborative Design Thinking worksheet
- Colored pencils
- Sticky notes
- Large sheets of paper or poster board
- Access to ChatGPT or another AI tool (optional)
Learning Sequence
Lesson Plan Introduction
This activity goes beyond simply teaching about climate change and introduces students to climate change mitigation approaches through using engineering design approaches. Geoengineering is the deliberate modification of an environmental system with the intent to reduce the negative impacts of climate change. This introductory activity intentionally avoids discussions of ongoing research in geoengineering (e.g., solar radiation management) to avoid their impact on students’ creative processes. Instead, this activity asks students to imagine a new technology or social process to mitigate climate change.
Activity Details
Activity setup
- Introduce the evidence of global warming and climate change in the U.S. as well as various climate “tipping points” that may be reached given some amount of global warming using the PowerPoint.
- Provide a brief overview of several environmental systems before proceeding.
Establishing the design criteria
- Introduce the design criteria to the students.
- Each design must modify or work with a existing environmental systems.
- Each design’s intent is to mitigate climate change.
Brainstorming and Idea Generation
- Divide students into groups of 3-5
- Review the Rules for Brainstorming (see lesson plan).
- Students spend three minutes writing brainstorming ideas on sticky notes
- OPTIONAL – Students develop AI prompt(s) to generate brief ideas for geoengineering solutions and copy ideas onto sticky notes.
- Each group then collects and organizes their sticky notes to mind maps/idea clusters.
Concept Sketching
- Students decide on their groups’ top three designs and sketch them on a poster sheet.
- The class reviews each other’s posters via gallery walk and adds questions to the posters.
- Each rotation should allow for 4-5 minutes, until each paper has input from everyone in the group.
Presentation, elaboration and gathering feedback
- Student groups share their ideas.
- Example facilitation questions are included in the lesson plan.
Conclusion
If you would like to spend more than one class period on this lesson you can consider a longer feedback period including students sharing their ideas with the class. Extra time could also be spent creating prototypes for student models.
Lesson materials
Download the files below to teach this lesson. PDFs are accessible versions; PowerPoint and Excel files can be edited for your class.
Teacher resources
Full lesson plan
Lesson slides
Student resources
Collaborative design thinking worksheet
Credit and contact
Credit
Created by the Indiana University Climate Engineering team: Paul Goddard, Ben Kravitz, and Adam Scribner.
Contact
Questions about this lesson, or need a file in another format? Contact:
- Paul Goddard – pgoddard@iu.edu
- Ben Kravitz – bkravitz@iu.edu
- Adam Scribner – jascrib@iu.edu