Volunteers needed

Laurie Johnson, visiting scholar at the RU Program in Science in Learning, is looking for undergraduate student volunteers to play a climate change pollution economics game as part of a teacher training session for the Citizen Climate Cost Project (description below). Laurie notes that it is  an exciting project, and the game is fun and educational. In appreciation, every volunteer will receive a small gift card, and there will be also be small prizes for players who make the highest (hypothetical) earnings in the game.

The session will be held in Room 108, Waller Hall, on the Cook Campus from 10 am – 11:30 a.m. on Wednesday February 10th. 

Students that would like to volunteer should contact Laurie Johnson directly at laurie.johnson@rutgers.edu with SUBJECT LINE: Game Volunteer. The first 15 students to respond will be invited. 

Please share this note with your students.

An Overview of the Citizen Climate Cost Project
The Citizen Climate Cost Project is a new project with the goals of educating students and the broader public about the social and economic costs of climate change, inspiring youth leadership within affected communities to demand climate change action, and developing a platform for simultaneously documenting climate change costs and getting climate change victims’ stories heard.

The project starts with an interactive classroom game and lesson on the economics of climate change, combined with a field assignment requiring high school students to go out into their communities and collect stories and data through interviewing climate-affected individuals. Students will then integrate their classroom learning, interviews, and data into a capstone video project that will be part of an inter-high school competition.

Through students, the project webpage, and social media, data and successful videos will be shared with the public, advocacy groups, and researchers. As a possible extension, if the students’ work demonstrates a proof of concept for citizen-based climate cost data collection, the University of Massachusetts will host an open access database, where citizens at large can directly submit their own cost data.

The project has received initial funding from the Alex C. Walker and the Kettering Family Foundations.