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Teaching Climate Change Impact on Cold Regions to Multidisciplinary Undergraduate Students
ASCE Conf. Proc. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1061/40792(173)261
Impacts of Global Climate Change
Proceedings of World Water and Environmental Resources Congress 2005
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Add to FacebookAbstract only available. Climate change concerns all walks of life. Its impact is everywhere but most acutely felt in the cold regions. A few degrees of change in air temperature could mean drastic change of plant growth season, river navigation, permafrost stability.. among numerous other examples. The frequency of climate change issues appearing on the news demands more education on these topics. By their natures, climate change impacts on cold regions are multi‐disciplinary. The trans‐Alaska pipeline is a typical case where many socio‐economical, science and technology pros and cons intersect. In fall of 2004, we are offering a science seminar course to the junior class of Clarkson University's honors students. The character of our honors program is to “focus on the current and emerging problems in science, technology, and society” and “learn by solving real‐world problems in multi‐disciplinary teams”. Each semester students from this program must take a course together no matter what major they are in. In the junior year, this course is called “The Science Seminar”. In this paper we will describe the process from proposing this course to assessing the outcome at the end. The course consists of four activities: instructors' lectures, students' preparatory home works, students' group projects, and weekly and final presentations. In this paper we will describe how students were prepared to conduct a team project of their choice, under the general theme of climate change impact in cold regions. We will give detailed examples of how they progress in teams towards their project goal and how they shared the knowledge with the rest of the class. We will also summarize their scientific findings. This course is designed so that depth of knowledge is obtained from individuals and within individual teams, and breadth of understanding is obtained through periodic short presentations and feedbacks from other classmates with diverse background. Our hypothesis is that this kind of courses can offer a powerful way to educate undergraduate students on many ongoing research topics and their interdependency in climate change in cold regions.
© 2005 ASCE
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Climatic changes, Cold regions, Undergraduate study, Engineering education, Rivers, PermafrostARTICLE DATA
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