With posters lined around the Atrium at the IU School of Education, around 200 local middle and high school students presented their solutions to climate change during the second annual Geoengineering Summit. 

Prep for the summit started months earlier, when teachers were given a five-lesson unit and attended the Geoengineering workshop in December. Both introduce the idea of geoengineering and encourage students to come up with their own solutions to climate issues. After learning three of the lessons, students were asked to come up with their own solutions to problems caused by climate change, using geoengineering. They present those ideas to IU climate scientists and SOE science education graduate students and faculty. 

Adam Scribner, Director of STEM Education Initiatives, co-developed and co-designed the five lessons with IU geoengineering researchers Ben Kravitz and Paul Goddard.

“I tell my students when I teach methodology classes that if students aren’t thinking about how they’re going to apply what they learn, they’re probably not learning,” Scribner said. “This is applied learning. This is asking students how they’re going to solve a problem.”

As someone who has worked in STEM education for 25 years, Scribner says the summit is a one-of-a-kind program, unique throughout the country. It’s also a low stakes way for students to gain experience presenting their ideas for a STEM project in a non-competitive way while also teaching them about real science that’s happening in the geoengineering field.  

“We want to teach students about the ethical considerations about geoengineering and we want to engage students in providing their own solutions to some of the world’s (biggest) issues, like climate change,” Scribner said. “When I was growing up, I learned a lot about the world’s problems - ozone layer depletion, climate change - but I was never asked how I could be part of the solution. That’s what we’re doing, we’re having students think about how they would solve climate change. And they would do that through engineering solutions, not just policy solutions.”

The summit was developed in partnership with faculty from IU’s Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, IU School of Education, and the Environmental Resilience Institute, as well as teachers from Arsenal Technical High School, Cardinal Ritter High School, Cascade High School, Center Grove Middle School, Danville Middle School, and Purdue Polytechnic High School. The summit is funded by 2892 Miles to Go, which is supported by the National Geographic Society.