UPEI professor developing climate change resources for K-12 students

A professor at UPEI is designing a set of educational tools to make climate change easier for kids to understand.

The resources will be a mix of online and printed materials that will show how climate change affects the weather and creates natural disasters.

"This is really important to help us, not only raise the public awareness of climate change, but most importantly to encourage people to take action eventually," said Xander Wang, director of the Climate Smart Lab at UPEI's School of Climate Change and Adaptation.

"For some of the concepts or maybe some of the extreme events, we kind of can use what we have for P.E.I, just like real world examples for teaching."

The goal is to eventually include these resources in the curriculum for students in kindergarten through Grade 12 in both English and French.

The new resources are still in the early stages, and will require quite a bit of research and feedback before they become a reality for students in P.E.I. public schools.

Teachers looking for resources

Wang said he often hears from Island teachers that are looking for teaching resources, because kids ask them questions about climate change that they don't have the answers to.

"There are not too many resources that are available for them to really use for teaching," he said.

"We're fed with a lot of bad news about climate change. Extreme weather, wildfires, flooding … when they see that, certainly they worry about the future."

Wang said the more youth know about climate change, and the ways researchers are trying to tackle it, the better. 

"They really need to know what's going on, what scientific issues we're facing," he said.

Working with teachers, students

The resources will be a mix of different components, said Wang, ranging from cartoons and comic books for younger kids, to traditional printed out resources for teachers. 

"We also want to consider some online resources, like maybe videos, animations or maybe some interactive web pages, so that they can do some quizzes and then get some feedback," he said.

Wang is used to teaching undergraduate students, so he says there will be a lot of feedback needed to appeal to a younger audience.

"It will have a lot of challenges, I believe, because this is our first time to tackle these kind of teaching resources for a young generation," he said.

With funding assistance from the P.E.I. Climate Challenge fund, Wang says he hopes to have the resources prepared in about a year, and then take another year to tweak them with teacher and student feedback before fully launching the tools.

"Eventually, I think they will have some interest in studying climate change," he said.

"We really need [the] young generation to get involved."