This project aims to change students' behaviour and societies' mindset conerning climate change and environmental threats through education.
"Climate change is not a hoax. Avoiding climate change is a better and cheaper option than cleaning up or mitigating its impact."
The Climate Action project is a free student-centered project - a 6 weeks journey involving more than 2.5 million students across 135 countries. It is supported by governments in 15 countries. The project is free, student-centered and aims to lead to a change of behavior through education. It is in collaboration with WWF and NASA, and endorsed by Jane Goodall, President Higgins, Kumi Naidoo, scientists and public figures. It was covered by media across 45 countries including BBC, CNN and National Geographic.
The project allows teachers to connect and interact with other teachers from every continent. Teachers are being sent curriculum and will be personally guided by facilitators. Students will be offered great opportunities and a different way of learning. They will be the ones solving problems, sharing their findings and taking action. At the end of the project there will be live interactions and webinars by experts. Students and teachers will receive a certificate. We work very closely with large teacher organisations in 35 countries to make sure that the project is relevant to the specific needs in certain countries.
During 6 weeks, students will brainstorm, explore, create, discuss and share their findings online. They will try to solve problems and take action.
Each week they create a video of their findings to be published to this website. This way students are able to learn from their peers globally and will discover that climate change may appear very differently in other parts of the world. During the last week there will be live, virtual interactions via video conferencing tools, so students are able to share their findings live. We also will have hosting experts during webinars so students are able to learn from world-renowned experts. Last year we had Matt Larsen-Daw from WWF, Rick Davis from NASA, the famous and Celine Cousteau, to name a few.
"We aim to give students a mindblowing experience. This leads to mindblowing outcomes."
We believe that for some topics - like climate change - there are better ways to learn than by memorizing and assessing definitions. By shifting to other learning approaches like collaborative learning, learning by doing, playful learning, learning from experts, etc we try to target skills which become increasingly important:
- Collaboration
- Creativity
- Empathy
- Critical thinking
- Problem solving
The project is open to students aged 4 to 21. Each level can participate at its own capacity. Kindergarten and primary school students can create drawings and cardboard prototypes while secondary school and university students can create small inventions, deepen their understanding and do research. The project can also be introduced in all subjects: mathematics, science, English, history, art, etc.
Each age, subject and school requires a different approach.
The programme was co-written with WWF to give teachers the right facts and context. The programme is available in 14 languages.
Lesson plans have also been developed to guide students through the six weeks. Finally, there are activities for students to do at school or at home: create your own bioplastic, solar car, vertical garden, etc.
This project aims to change behavior and mindset but had some unexpected side effects: we managed to bring change in government and society. Our project led to mindblowing outcomes. How about students planting 60 million trees in Malawi, 3D-printing coral reefs in Canada, developing solar-driven cars in India, a flashmob with famous artist in Germany, students in Indonesia developed their own ecobricks and this year... students will be even able to send their drawings and prototypes to Mars. Please do join the project and let's give our children the future they deserve.
Source: Climate Action Project - website
