We want to help you empower your students to ask their questions about climate change – and to have those questions answered directly by climate experts.
Curious Climate Schools is based on student-led inquiry
In 2021, teachers from more than 27 primary and secondary school classes from around Tasmania facilitated climate conversations with their students.
Students came up with their own questions, and decided on the most important 10 questions their class wanted to submit.
Some submitted their questions as posters, or videos, others as text.
We had 57 experts in climate change busy answering all these questions. Our experts all work on different aspects of climate change, from Agricultural impacts to Bushfire to Climate modelling; we have conservation scientists, chemists, law professors, social scientists, engineers, geologists, oceanographers, paleoclimatologists and health scientists - and many more.
On 1 November 2021, at the same time as COP26, the United Nations climate change negotiations, our website with all the students' questions and experts answers went live. You can see which class asked what, and access video and webpage answers for every question. We also grouped questions by expert, by theme and those that are most asked.
As well as answers to all the questions, we developed resources for students and teachers about 'What can I do?', how to deal with feelings about climate change, and what's being done by governments.
On 3 November 2021, Curious Climate Schools was featured on UCTV Alive for Kids.
All schools who registered interest in the program, including those that didn't submit their questions in time, were offered an expert visit in the first two weeks of November 2021.
Curious Climate Schools is back for 2022!
Questions will be submitted by Friday 30th September, experts will start answering questions in October and visiting schools in November 2022.
For more information contact our project team at [email protected]
Example of a picture question from a Grade 5 student
Example of a video question from a Grade 5 student
The website contains:
- An interactive map of all the questions asked by students around Tasmania in 2021, with links to expert answers.
- A thematic list of the top questions and answers in each region.
- The answers will be given by named experts either in video format or in text and images on the website.
- Where possible, an expert was organised to speak directly to classes in person or online.
