Teaching Tips

• Instead of a 'Game Record' for each player to record their journey at the end of the lesson, students could map out their journey to the 4 different stations for each round and compare and contrast the pattern of their journey between the two.
• "Want To Do More?" suggestions are good for elaborating on the learning.

About the Content

• Focus of the activity is how human activities have changed the distribution of carbon among Earth's atmosphere, lithosphere, biosphere, and hydrosphere.
• Compares the carbon cycle before the Industrial Revolution with the carbon cycle after humans began burning large quantities of fossil fuels.
• Comments from expert scientist: A neat approach to understanding the carbon cycle, the magnitudes of the flows, and humans--incorporates physical activity and probability. The activity doesn't communicate the size of each stock, only the flows between them--a really important part of the basic carbon cycle concept to communicate.

About the Pedagogy

• The activity outlines questions for each section of the game, suggesting stopping points for students to think and evaluate what they have done to that point.
• Provides additional activity ideas such as story boards and graphing the data.
• Activity is one of 10 in the NOAA activity book Discover Your Changing World with NOAA http://oceanservice.noaa.gov/education/discoverclimate/.

Technical Details/Ease of Use

• Must build game cubes; templates are provided.

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