{"id":1056,"date":"2010-02-23T16:38:55","date_gmt":"2010-02-23T21:38:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.easterbrook.ca\/steve\/?p=1056"},"modified":"2010-02-23T16:38:55","modified_gmt":"2010-02-23T21:38:55","slug":"do-try-this-at-home","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.easterbrook.ca\/steve\/2010\/02\/do-try-this-at-home\/","title":{"rendered":"Do try this at home"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last week, I ran a workshop for high school kids from across Toronto on “What can computer models tell us about climate change?<\/em>“. I already posted some of the material I used: the history of our knowledge<\/a> about climate change. Jorge, Jon and Val ran another workshop after mine, entitled “Climate change and the call to action: How you can make a difference<\/em>“. They have already blogged their reflections: See Jon’s summary of the workshop plan<\/a>, and reflections on how to do it better <\/a>next time, and the need for better metaphors<\/a>. I think both workshops could have done with being longer, for more discussion and reflection\u00a0(we were scheduled only 75 minutes for each). But I enjoyed both workshops a lot, as I find it very useful for my own thinking to consider how to talk about climate change with kids, in this case mainly from grade 10 (\u224815 years old).<\/p>\n

The main idea I wanted to get across in my workshop was the role of computer models: what they are, and how we can use them to test out hypotheses about how the climate works. I really wanted to do some live experiments, but of course, this is a little hard when a typical climate simulation run takes weeks of processing time on a supercomputer. There are some tools that high school kids could<\/em> play with in the classroom, but none of them are particularly easy to use, and of course, they all sacrifice resolution for ability to run on a desktop machine. Here are some that I’ve played with:<\/p>\n