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Education -
General
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Written by Andrew Binder
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Tuesday, 14 November 2006 |
Even with a classroom full of eager Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences undergraduate students, Assistant Professor Galen McKinley faced a problem in 2005: How to take an interest in everyday weather reports and transfer it to the wider scope of global climate changes.
“When I first started teaching this course I found it was really hard to get the students interested in climate, because all we had was sort of a static map,” she says, pointing to a black-and-white earth in the course textbook. “It’s not interactive and it’s not exciting.”
The solution, McKinley discovered, lay in a computer simulation called Educational Global Climate Modeling, or EdGCM. Incorporating the software into AOS 425, Global Climate Processes, in fall 2005, she was able to help students bridge the gap between weather and climate, right on their computer screens.
“If you notice over 150 years that the surface temperature has changed, you might look at how drought or precipitation or ice cover has changed,” she says. “Now you have a way to connect all those different variables that we’re talking about in class. We could talk about them [before], but now you can see it.”
From a pedagogical standpoint, incorporating EdGCM into her class took minimum effort, McKinley says. Most of the work came down to manipulating example models and structuring assignments based on them.
“I think that’s what the EdGCM is really trying to offer. It’s just a package that anyone can download, and even teachers who aren’t terribly familiar with climate could use it.”
Manipulating climate models gave undergraduate students a chance to use a simpler version of an advanced technology normally available only to the field’s graduate students and researchers.
“It’s a way to teach the students about a tool that’s actually used in research and to think about the benefits and negatives of those models,” she explains. “It’s trying to understand how those models work and how they’re used.”
While it hasn’t been possible to determine the specific impact of the simulations on students’ learning, positive course evaluations indicated that it was helpful and the students liked using the EdGCM.
“It seems to me that it improved the connection to the material at least. I do feel that students learned from it and were able to understand the aspects of the course better,” McKinley concludes. “It’s a great tool. It’s a really great tool.”
-- Andrew Binder (original article)
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