In this activity, students develop concept maps of the carbon cycle through a die-rolling game that simulates carbon reservoirs and fluxes. By the end of this activity, students should be able to describe and explain how the carbon cycle has changed in the last 250 years.

Students will learn that there is a finite amount of carbon on earth, which moves around in the environment, from one place to another. Activity is scaleable from elementary to high school with options to introduce advanced content. Wrap up includes role playing the carbon cycle with the addition of human influences (e.g. burning of fossil fuels). Activity can be done in classroom or outside, includes working in a group and role playing. Grades 3-12. This resources is part of the Our Changing Ocean and Estuaries Series

In this activity, students use a physical model to learn the basics of photosynthesis and respiration within the carbon cycle.

In this activity, students work in groups, plotting carbon dioxide concentrations over time on overheads and estimating the rate of change over five years. Stacked together, the overheads for the whole class show an increase on carbon dioxide over five years and annual variation driven by photosynthesis. This exercise enables students to practice basic quantitative skills and understand how important sampling intervals can be when studying changes over time. A goal is to see how small sample size may give incomplete picture of data.

This interactive visualization explains the chemical relationship between carbon dioxide, shell building, and ocean acidification.

SYNOPSIS: In this lesson, students think critically about carbon emission reduction strategies proposed by companies.

SCIENTIST NOTES: This lesson challenges students to analyze "green" claims and provides context to "net zero" greenhouse gas emission goals. Students are tasked with evaluating a company’s sustainability plan and then presenting their findings to classmates. The included video resources are well-sourced and highlight how greenwashing can mislead consumers and how "net zero" emission goals are often just a way for corporations to procrastinate on taking meaningful steps to mitigate climate change. This lesson is recommended for teaching.

POSITIVES:
-Students will be assessing the validity of sustainability plans within companies which helps with critical thinking skills.
-Students become more informed consumers.

ADDITIONAL PREREQUISITES:
-Teachers should try to find their school or Board of Education’s sustainability policy prior to class.
-Teachers should be familiar with what a sustainability plan looks like.

DIFFERENTIATION:
-Students may need help with research techniques. Teacher could give five options for students to choose from, and the students pick a company from those five options.
-Students may need help picking a company to research. Students can focus on companies where they spend money, either online or in their neighborhood.

Step 1. Students are asked to keep track of their energy use from a variety of sources (heating/cooling, electricity, transportation, secondary emissions, etc) during the 9 days of Thanksgiving break, when many of them are likely to travel. They use the total for the 9 days that they calculated using an online calculator to estimate their yearly footprint and compare it to US and world averages. For most of them, the amount of carbon emitted during those 9 days is quite large because of airplane travel or long-distance driving. However, using a week of break when many students will travel allows them to become aware of the significance of transportation in carbon emissions. We provided a table with electricity and heating/cooling bills for various residence halls for students who stay on campus during the break.

Step 2. Students complete an online survey where they are asked to enter the values that they have obtained for the various components of the calculator, perform some simple calculations and compare their annual footprint to the U.S. average. We used SurveyGizmo for the survey because it allows to download the data in a spreadsheet format and has some limited plotting features. The free version allows a maximum of 250 submissions, the Basic version ($19 per month, can be canceled at any time) has unlimited submissions.
Step 3. Students write an essay through BlackBoard/WebCT (Assignment). A few guiding questions are provided for this essay where students reflect on the results of their impact on the global carbon budget, what they found surprising, and if they plan to make any changes to their lifestyle to limit their impact. No length limit is set for the essay.

The guidelines and components of this assignment are available on a wiki page. The three steps can be implemented in BlackBoard/WebCT as a Lesson Plan with links to the online calculator (step 1), to the survey (step 2), and to the Assignment/essay (step 3).

(Note: this resource was added to OER Commons as part of a batch upload of over 2,200 records. If you notice an issue with the quality of the metadata, please let us know by using the 'report' button and we will flag it for consideration.)

This video features a number of different climate scientists describing the effects of the increasing amount of carbon dioxide on global climate and proposing a series of solutions to mitigate these effects. Video addresses health problems and other costs to humans associated with climate change.

Students play the role of carbon atoms to learn about the carbon cycle and how it is changing. Students create two carbon cycle diagramsâvisual models of the cycle before and after the Industrial Revolution. They reflect on the game and how scientists believe humans are impacting this critical Earth system.

This series of two lessons uses cutting-edge scientific research on the effects of climate change on communities in the intertidal. Through a combination of a dynamic presentation and several videos, students are introduced to the effects of climate change on the ocean (ocean acidification and temperature increase) and what is known about how ocean organisms are affected. Then students read and interpret graphs and construct a scientific explanation based on data from this research.

In this activity, student teams research and develop a proposal to decrease the carbon footprint of their city's/town's public transportation system and then prepare a report that explains why their transportation plan is the best for their community.

This video lesson aims to motivate students about chemistry and to raise their awareness about how chemistry helps in solving certain environmental problems. In this lesson, the air pollution problem created by cars and other vehicles is presented. The lesson will highlight causes of this problem, harmful products from it and possible solutions. There will also be discussion of ways to convert the pollutants produced by burning oil in vehicles into more friendly products.

This game is an expansion on the popular board game Catan, it adapts the regular Catan game to become a game about sustainability and climate change. It's a neat idea, but teachers must already own the game and know how to play it.

This game-based learning would be great for after-school activities, environmental clubs, or a 'free' period in school. The amount of setup needed to get the game going and explain the rules may be too involved for regular classroom use.

This animation illustrates how the hardiness zones for plants have changed between 1990 and 2006 based data from 5,000 National Climatic Data Center cooperative stations across the continental United States.

Key figure from the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report that shows changes in global average surface temperature, global average sea level, and Northern Hemisphere snow cover from as far back as 1850.

This video looks at the impact of changing climate on animal habitats around the world, showing how different creatures are responding to changing temperatures and precipitation patterns.

This activity engages students in the analysis of climate data to first find areas in the southern United States that are now close to having conditions in which the malaria parasite and its mosquito hosts thrive and then attempt to forecast when areas might become climatically suitable.

This video addresses the impact of climate change on several butterfly populations. Warming temperatures lead to shifts in location of populations of butterflies or die-offs of populations unable to adapt to changing conditions or shift to new locations.

This video provides a comprehensive introduction to the role of coral reefs, the physiology of corals, and the impacts of ocean warming and acidification on coral survival. It highlights experts from the Bermuda Institute of Ocean Sciences and the University of Miami.