Case Study: YEP!(Youth Educating the Public!)

A high school-level program on climate change

Using the CAM approach, we developed and executed a high school level summer program. By the program's third week, the students had re-named the program YEP!, or "Youth Educating the Public!" While the focus of our grant is on the students who are producing the media, and not necessarily on the broader public (i.e., learning through the process of video production, rather than focusing on the resulting product), their name captures the essence of what their goal was by the middle of the program.

In addition to playing the World Climate simulation game, we developed several interactive science components for the program. One example was the "CO₂ backpack:" After calculating their carbon footprints and converting values to pounds per day, we brought in a balance, a large backpack, and household items and asked students to load up the backpack with a weight equivalent to their daily carbon footprint (about 140 pounds/day for the average American). The exercise clearly drove home the scale of human emissions, especially when extrapolated across the global population.

We also combined learning video production techniques with learning science or systems thinking content. For example, students produced a short systems thinking video: after teaching students how to map causal loop diagrams, we asked them to go out in the surrounding area and film a system nearby. We then came back to groups, showed the videos, and discussed their systemic structure.

Some of the videos they produced can be found here: CAM TV page.