Climatedu Project!

Climatedu is an online climate course that is geared toward all middle and high school students interested. It comprises climate change content, design, social media, web development subteams and outreach. The Climatedu team meets weekly and discusses their plans to create a comprehensive curriculum promoting environmental awareness and activism.

In March 2021, Climatedu launched its eight-unit curriculum, covering all the foundational principles to applied solutions with included topics such as waste, food, energy, urbanization, and transportation. The captivating work that Climatedu focuses on has reached so many people through social media such as their instagram platform: @climateduteam.

Climatedu is currently working with the MCPS curriculum specialists to develop a plan for a future youth climate summit and implement their designed curriculum on a countywide level. Along with that they are also partnering with other organizations that translate into their own philosophy and purpose of their course. Climatedu has expanded their program and will be running workshops at events such as Columbia University’s Youth Climate Summit.

Project lead, Vivian Li from Montgomery Blair High School explains, “establishing a shared understanding of the climate crisis and its necessary solutions is one of the toughest barriers we face in taking action.” As project lead and founder of Climatedu, Vivian started this project because she, “felt like climate education didn’t have sufficient space in our MCPS middle school curriculum,” and she wanted to “find a suitable online resource that I could refer to the Board.” Unfortunately, she wasn’t able to find such a resource so she soon got together a team of about twenty people and went off to create their own program.

Climatedu continues to work in hopes of spreading more information and educating students on climate change and sustainability. It essentially “frames the climate crisis with hope for the future- a change of pace from the usual doom and gloom that pushes the audience away,” says Project Lead Vivian Li.

Some ways to engage with Climatedu include registering for the course which can be found @climatedu.org and by following Climatedu on Instagram.

If you are interested here are a few relevant links:

Curriculum Preview: climatedu.org/course/intro

Official Course: climatedu.org

Instagram: @climateduteam.