Wesleyan University -

Professor Johan Varekamp’s new First Year Initiative course on CO₂ (EE&S 132) takes students on an exploration of atmospheric chemistry, examining the science, as well as the social and political aspects of Global Climate Change. The FYI pedagogical model, which emphasizes small class size and a seminar-style interaction focused on writing, research, analysis, discussion, and critical thinking, is a perfect fit for the course.

"We were on a mission trying to collect data and make sense of it."

Varekamp had the freshmen students performing experiments and observations, collecting data, and interpreting them using Excel and various computer models of environmental carbon cycling. Even though the course is math and science intensive, Varekamp designed the format to allow students to find their own comfort-level by choosing to be in one of four focus groups—greenhouse experiments with plants, computer models of carbon cycles, CO₂ gas measurements, and a group that looked at social factors like trends in energy consumption and the feedback of climate change on humans.

Mixing hard science with the social and political implications of a topic is, as Varekamp noted, "a very Wesleyan thing." Later in the semester, the class evaluated the computer game SimEarthä against its own experimental results, checking to see where the program accurately reflects current scientific knowledge and where it stretches reality. Rather than having the computing activities set apart from the rest of the course, as can happen when a class has to move to a computer lab for certain days out of the semester, Varekamp used the new ITS AppleCart, dovetailing the computing with the rest of the lecture,

Describing the first semester of the CO₂ class as "exploration" is especially apt--Varekamp himself was new to the topic "[This] was really a brand new field for me, actually doing atmospheric chemistry, doing the actual measurements, and we indeed stumbled hand in hand through and discovered the primary literature and figured out that what we were seeing…It’s quite exciting.".

The class, 18 freshmen, one teaching apprentice, and Varekamp, performed all sorts of CO2-oriented observations, such as measuring the gas levels from with a detector stuck outside a van while driving on Connecticut highways and byways. They also measured CO2 levels around the Science Tower from detectors stuck outside the building on the 4th floor and from the roof. What they discovered was that their initial assumptions about local CO₂ source variability were wrong. For instance, the greatest pulsations in the CO₂ levels around the Science Tower were attributable to daily changes in air and ground temperature, and not, as they originally expected, to usage of automobiles by Wesleyan faculty and staff.

Other activities the class were involved with include measuring CO₂ usage by plants in a tabletop greenhouse (by the green house-plants group), creating from scratch a carbon cycling model in BASIC that simulates the earth’s atmosphere from 1850 to the present, and 50 years in the future for different scenarios of fossil fuel burning and energy use (the modeling group). As Varekamp explains, "that’s the spirit of the whole class—that we were on a mission trying to collect data and make sense of it."

After students had worked on the carbon-cycling models and laid down a basic understanding of how climates work, Varekamp introduced the program SimEarthä , which the students ran right in their classroom on Macintosh iBooks from the new ITS AppleCart. SimEarthä is a game where the player sets up initial conditions on a newly formed planet, and then the program runs simulated eons of time. Climates develop, primitive then advanced life develops, and the planet either crashes ecologically, or persists. The key is to get the initial conditions right, and produce environmentally friendly agricultural, technological, and environmental policies once intelligent life "evolves." Working in groups of two or three, the students worked through various scenarios with SimEarth, then the class explored the empirical realism and imperfections in the SimEarth model--where it was accurate, based on their own models of carbon cycling, and where it was not.

Games and simulation program, such as SimEarth , are coming to the forefront of education, and one can easily find an array of educational games on the Internet, commercial and shareware, representing disciplines like engineering, physics, medicine, biology, economics, political science and public policy, psychology, and mathematics. In addition to highlighting specific disciplinary concepts, simulation and games help students understand theory, model building and testing, and the overall nature of complex systems. Running through the simulations in class, using the iBooks, was particularly useful for the class. The students worked in groups of two or three, and were able to examine the other groups’ simulations right there during regular class time, getting more out of the exercise than had they done it on their own in one of the Academic Computing Labs. In Varekamp’s view, the iBooks really helped expand the in-class learning experience.

Varekamp stresses that hard-core science classes can tend to be boring if the teaching simply stresses content in a "this-is-the-way-it-is" manner. But having students collect their own data and "figure it out," and then explore the complexity of their findings using computer simulations makes learning much more exciting, despite the fact that students may have to deal with a fair amount of math, physics, and chemistry. Mixing the FYI course format (small class size and a seminar style discussions) with hands-on, practical experiments and exercises helped "take away all the fear of hard math and physics," says Varekamp, "and it seems a little bit like a game!"