How does playing The Wedge Game affect undergraduates' outlook on solving the climate crisis?
Abstract
The Stabilization Wedges exercise, developed by the Carbon Mitigation Initiative at Princeton University, has offered a framework for users to build their own solution to the climate problem since its introduction in 2008. Users stabilize carbon emissions by choosing nine of 15 possible "wedges". Each wedge reduces global carbon emissions by 25 gigatons over a 50-year period, compared to the business as usual scenario. Implementing any wedge is challenging but feasible. For example, halting global deforestation over the next 50 years would store roughly 25 gigatons of carbon in trees. This is among the most popular wedges our students chose.
We played The Wedge Game with nearly 1,000 undergraduate students enrolled across multiple semesters of Introduction to Climate Change, an auditorium-scale general education course at a large public university. We present the measured impacts that The Wedge Game had on students' affective and human domains of learning. Specifically, we asked students to complete the following sentence: "Choosing the wedges I wanted to see in my future made climate change mitigation seem…" Approximately two thirds of students indicated that playing The Wedge Game made climate change mitigation seem more feasible. For one fourth of students, it made mitigation feel more challenging. About 4% of students used words like "hopeless". Ongoing work will track students' level of optimism both before and after The Wedge Game and will also composite students by their level of concern for global warming using the Global Warming's Six Americas framework. Students also explored updates to The Wedge Game (now 10 years old) by brainstorming new mitigation solutions outside the current 15 wedges. Innovative, potentially implementable new wedges include water conservation, birth rate reduction, and eating less meat. Our results suggest that playing The Wedge Game in class can help students move from climate knowledge toward envisioning the feasibility of societal-scale climate action.- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2019
- Bibcode:
- 2019AGUFMED31D0995E
- Keywords:
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- 0805 Elementary and secondary education;
- EDUCATION;
- 0810 Post-secondary education;
- EDUCATION;
- 0815 Informal education;
- EDUCATION;
- 0850 Geoscience education research;
- EDUCATION