The fact that the pilot teams sustained their engagement over such a long period of time is striking. Across the teams, was the project able to identify factors that contributed to engagement? Also, what did the project learn from the pilot that it applied to the second round?

Wow, what a great project! I really liked the goals of the project in that you are engaging students in real world problems and having them use scientific methods to help solve the problems. I have some questions about this project. Is this project a regional or national one? Can you describe or explain if consideration has been given to doing this nationally? Can any science teacher join and have their students be involved in this, and if yes, what is the process? I am also interested in finding out if students of ethnically diverse backgrounds and young women were involved in the project. Can you also describe some of the challenges you encountered as the project moved forward? Again, I think this is a great project and looking forward to the discussion!

I love the idea of focusing on potential solutions that mitigate rather than (yet again) the problem of climate change. So much more effective in the long run. Is there a plan for follow up – could some of these proposed solutions become commercial projects?

Yes, the whole design of the original idea was informed by the 2009 report from the American Psychological Association, which emphasized the importance of empowerment around the issue of climate change. With regard to commercialization, we were concerned about ownership of ideas, and decided to deal with it by posting a disclaimer on the project website, as follows: “As is many crowdsourcing efforts, winning ideas submitted to the competition become the property of the sponsor of the competition, in this case TERC. Since TERC is a non-profit, we will ‘give back’ the crowdsourced results to the public on ethical grounds, for non-commercial purposes, under a Creative Commons license.” It is possible that some ideas might become viable commercial projects – at least two of the teams have told us that they were highly motivated by the project to continue to work on the ideas they developed for the project.

Great project, Gillian. I wonder where the crowd-sourcing comes in. I see where students are working in teams, but I don’t get the crowd-sourcing.

Also, I like all the results you report, and I wonder what you can tell us about how to get such results from other programs? e.g., sustained engagement over a long period of time. What does it take for that?

I wonder, too, how you trained grad students who participated. What were their roles?

What, too, did you learn about student learning? (Actually, I think their engagement with science and engineering and their excitement about science and engineering might be enough, but I wonder.)

Finally, have you thought about how to help learners sustain their new selves — the selves who are excited about environment, science, engineering, learning, …? You have a wonderful infrastructure for fostering identity work — the reflection people need to do to become new people and feel good in their new shoes, or to figure out that something does not suit them. I wonder how you are taking advantage of the infrastructure for such identity work. If you are not doing that yet, then I think you can use your infrastructure to begin to learn what those who are successfully refining their identities are doing and then think about how to systematize that (without getting rid of the fun and the learner agency, of course). There is also literature on fostering identity work.

I’m moving to Boston; perhaps we can talk about all this after I move.

Janet – Wow, a lot of thoughtful comment and questioning…I’d love to talk about all this when you’re in Boston!
About crowsourcing – You’re right there is no crowdsourcing in this design. As we originally conceived of the project design, we imagined that the online space would provide a public forum for exchange and improvement of ideas from many students and/or teams from all over the country so as to elicit a multiplicity of approaches and ideas. To us at least, this represented a kind of “crowdsourcing solutions to mitigation” if you like (though there is debate about a specific definition of crowdsourcing). However, as we got into the details of design and recruitment, the competitive element and the chance of winning a prize seemed important components that would, we theorized, contribute to motivation and persistence. There were also concerns about ownership of ideas in the pilot. So, ultimately we made the decision to create private project spaces for each team. The second round, in having a larger reach, has more of a crowdsourcing approach, and we also solicited all the entrants to comment on the submitted ideas…
About sustained engagement – We think there were at least two factors at play, one was the important role the teacher played as coach, and the other was the enthusiasm of the teams for the mission. All of them mentioned how important the issue of climate change is, and how much it mattered to them to try to “make a difference” in addressing a meaningful real-world problem – so in this, we do have a self-selection bias. The students also mentioned the open-ended nature of the problem space, and specifically how it challenged them to use their imaginations.
About grad students – We provided a two-hour webinar to provide orientation, and shared a brief FAQ document with guidelines about how to provide constructive feedback as a “critical friend,” judge when to ask questions and when to provide answers, and be alert for crises. Grad student roles varied across teams – some maintained regular contact, while others gave input at the outset but then did not seem to be needed once students got deeper into their project work. One grad student mentor, who was recruited by the team locally, provided a great deal of technical support – and also ended up telling us he learned quite a bit from the students’ project!
I agree, the levels of student engagement and excitement about science and engineering seem like enough! We’re in the process of analyzing student learning now, but anecdotal evidence from interviewing teams is that they learned a great deal about the science of their project – as well as quite a bit about the process of science. I agree about the value of identity work – we included a couple of identity questions in our survey, but haven’t paid as much attention to it as we could. Again, in interviews, a couple of students have told us that they see themselves as scientists now, having previously not felt any commitment to STEM before this experience. Looking forward to thinking with you about how to systematize ways to refine identity.

The video is beautifully done and the engagement of the students—and the sophistication and ambition of their ideas—are inspiring. I am happy to hear that a round two of the competition is underway!

It is a wonderful project to engage students in the important matter of climate education and sustaining what we have. Students can investigate and explore using a media that they are comfortable with and that has such high impact and reach.

Approaching climate change through inquiries into mitigation strategies really brings the students inside the problem. I think a video featuring the students telling their own stories would be even more powerful and revealing.

Richard – Have you seen the videos they submitted for the competition? They’re at innovatepilot.videohall.com. But I wonder if you’re thinking of a different way of framing the video for students so that they tell their own stories in addition to the science story we asked them to tell?

What a fabulous video about crowdsourcing ideas for mitigating climate change.
Hope it is OK to mention that you are making use of the fabulous Videohall.com platform that is the same platform being used for the current 2014 Video Teaching and Learning Video Showcase! Your project empowers teens, makes them part of the solution, and probably converts them to being activists. Actually have you tested this last assumption? Thanks for this great video!

What an interesting approach and focus – mitigating climate change. Seeing teenagers working on this and with such great ideas is encouraging. Their videos should be interesting to watch.

I really like the idea of having students working in teams and sharing their work with students at other schools. Have you considered having students at two or more different schools collaborating in the same team? In the real world today it’s not unusual to have work groups spread out all over the world.

Robert – one of our assumptions was that students might collaborate at a distance, so we set up the team spaces on the project website to make that possible. But as it turned out, the students on each pilot team all came from the same school. I suspect that we would have to actively recruit students to form teams in the way you suggest…a good idea to consider in the future!

Fascinating project, Gilly. I do wonder whether expecting to create viable teams at a distance makes sense for high school students. Collaboration at a distance is truly a challenge for us “professionals.”

Thank you Kathy! There are models of students conversing at a distance, perhaps sharing data as well, but it would be interesting to see if they could successfully manage a truly collaborative effort. Our teams efficiently managed their documents – papers to read,lists, lab notes, etc. – using google docs, but it would be more difficult for them to figure out how to share the work of their investigations. I’d guess a lot would depend on the type of design and testing they’d want to do…