Students create digital tools to solve problems

This year, our student changemakers are tackling their biggest challenge yet: the climate crisis. Young people will inherit the harsh reality of climate change and according to research from Teach the Future, '70% of teachers in the UK feel they have not received adequate training to educate students on climate change, its implications for the environment and societies around the world, and how these implications can be addressed'.

Driven by the UN Sustainable Development Goals, there are moves from across the four nations of the UK to address climate change within education. While we all strive to ensure that ‘learners acquire the knowledge and skills needed to promote sustainable development’, it takes time to embed new practices within curriculums.

We need to act sooner and that’s why we’re helping educators from across the UK through our new computing course, Innovate for Climate Change. On demand teacher training means it’s simple for teachers to pick up and deliver and there is zero cost to schools because it’s funded by our amazingly generous partners BNY Mellon, DeepMind, EPAM, the Garfield Weston Foundation, Google, RSA, SHCJ and Siemens.

Students engaging in Innovate for Climate Change, work in teams over 12 sessions to design an app to act on climate change. The course is mapped to the Computing/Technologies curriculums in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, as well as other subject areas, where relevant as it provides climate change education as well as cross-cutting digital skills.

We’ve achieved Skills Builder accreditation to ensure the course develops the essential skills students need, while giving opportunities to practise them with industry experts through online sessions and via our annual national Showcase.

We already have more than 400 students engaged in Innovate for Climate and our initial pilot found that 85% of students felt more knowledgeable about climate change after taking the course. Young people’s knowledge and passion for change was clear to see in the climate app ideas submitted for our annual Showcase.

To give a flavour of the pioneering climate tech innovation from Apps for Good students, here’s a selection of their ideas...

The Drop by Drop app, awarded Judge’s Favourite in the 2022 Showcase by category sponsor BNY Mellon, was inspired by the students’ personal experience of a lack of water. Haalah, Ritisha, Hooria, Rameen and Anoosha, from Woodford County High School for Girls in London, set out to decrease the amount of water we use and find ways of using water more sustainably. Their target audience is anyone that wants to be a part of saving our planet but mostly teenagers. The app gives users a survey to show their water usage with a score. It then offers challenges to reduce their water consumption and provides resources to learn more.

The team said, “This app can help people’s lives as they will have many different reasons for decreasing water usage for example; being more sustainable or wanting to lower bills. Also, this will help the planet as there will be less people wasting water, making our world a better place to live in. Whatever the reason, drop by drop will try and help.”

CarbonGPS (awarded ‘People’s Choice’ in the 2022 Showcase) is an app that gives people the power to fight climate change by using features including reminders and challenges to track carbon emissions. Driven by a belief in making small changes to make a big difference, Hasnain, Humza, Sohidul and Mahdi from Challney High School for Boys in Luton, Bedfordshire created this innovative app to track carbon emissions and show how users can decrease their carbon footprint. Features such as barcode scanners and leadership boards keep users engaged in the app.

Speaking about their experience, the students shared, “Our product is aimed at people worldwide who would like to take a stand against climate change and to make a difference no matter how big or small, using the tools we provide, as Small changes can make a Big difference.”

The students behind TravelBee created an app that benefits users in two ways: bringing down the cost of travel as well as reducing emissions. TravelBee was developed by Lucas, Matthew, and Thomas from Dr Challoner's Grammar School.

The interactive app uses government DNV API data, which provides up-to-date information about energy consumption to evaluate the fuel efficiency and carbon emissions of the user’s mode of transportation, whether car, bus or train. Users can share their efforts of going green and benefit from the mapping system, which helps provide a balance between carbon efficiency and low cost.

Speaking about their biggest challenge, the TravelBee team said, “One of the biggest challenges faced whilst making our app was marketing and appealing to a select demographic. The idea of a travel app has potential to appeal to a massive range of ages, but this would make it a struggle to market and develop, as we would need to attune finer details of the app depending on the group of people we chose.”

Our annual Showcase celebrates young innovators’ unique ideas brought to life through Apps for Good courses. Big thanks go to our students, who have worked extremely hard to develop and share their climate ideas and to their teachers for delivering the pioneering new course. Thanks also go to our Innovate for Climate Change partners, whose generous support means Innovate for Climate Change is 100% free of charge to schools, with special thanks to BNY Mellon, who also supported the production of this article.

Innovate for Climate Change is mapped to all UK curriculums and is available to schools 100% free of charge. You can access the course now.

There’s no bigger challenge young people will inherit than climate change - a challenge which schools currently feel ill-equipped to teach on their own. While many young people lack the skills they need to succeed in life, we bring together industry and educators to engage young people, from all backgrounds, in solving real world challenges. That’s why, in 2021 we began to pilot our new technology course - ‘Innovate for Climate Change’, which combines knowledge building with tech innovation skills, focused around the climate challenges young people care about.

With learning and social impact at the core of our approach, we worked with schools to test, refine and improve the course to ensure it delivers maximum value to students and teachers. The good news is, early feedback shows the course is having a positive impact on students because they feel engaged in creating change; some of the anxiety students feel about climate change is easing by understanding how they can make a difference and many students are feeling more empowered to act.

Over a 6 month period, we trained 11 secondary school teachers to deliver the course and reached 258 young people (aged 12 and 13), of which 64% were girls and 75% were from schools in challenging circumstances*. With the support of our Impact and Evaluation Consultant, Dr. Jami Dixon, we used a variety of qualitative and quantitative methods to capture feedback from students and teachers. We used short end of lesson student online questionnaires to help us understand what they were enjoying and where we needed to make changes. We then used semi-structured interviews with teachers and students to explore key themes in more detail. Finally, we conducted two student focus groups and analysed some of their work to build a sense of what students had gained from the course.

We’re really encouraged that overall we’ve received positive feedback from students in all of the schools - 85% of students feel more knowledgeable about climate change as a result of the course.

We know that climate anxiety is a big cause of anxiety for young people and that many feel disempowered to act. Climate education doesn’t always focus on positive actions, so our intention to create a computing course that gets young people thinking about climate change and how they can use technology to help solve it, is paying off. Our initial findings show they are feeling more optimistic and empowered to act as a result and this is something we want to explore further as we roll-out the course to more schools.

Student focus groups helped us understand why some have mixed feelings about climate change - they feel like there is still a lot out of their control and they are concerned about inaction. To address this we have made some changes to the course to have even more focus on how technology can help us act on climate change and also created opportunities earlier in the course for students to start generating their own ideas for action.

Here are some of the students’ thoughts and feelings:

Teachers have welcomed the integration of climate change education into the computing curriculum, even enjoying learning more about climate change themselves - an area of teaching where they feel support is lacking. Some have a new perspective on climate change and have even shared the course's resources with other teachers in the school. They also report positive engagement from students, which is pleasing to hear.

Of course - there is room for improvement and our Senior Learning Manager, Dr Emma Posey has been focused on incorporating valuable feedback from students and teachers into the next iteration of the course, which will be available to all schools from September 2022. This has involved better integrating understanding of climate change alongside developing skills in computing ; scaffolding the learning to reduce the cognitive load of learning new terms; strengthening programming knowledge; building in more digital and interactive content to reduce the volume of written work, and providing additional support tools for teachers to help build confidence with the subject area.

An example of feedback and recommendations received from students.

At Apps for Good, it’s important to us to reach all young people and that our courses are accessible to everyone. Consequently, we have focused our energy on drawing on different teaching approaches to help young people positively approach issues around climate change, for example young people producing ideas and programmes together, introducing the concept of ‘pair programming’ and 'design thinking'.

Through Innovate for Climate Change, not only do we want young people to develop computing skills and learn how they can act on climate change - we also want them to develop the ‘essential skills’ they’ll need for future careers. For example creativity, problem-solving, staying positive and teamwork. That’s why we’ve been working with SkillsBuilder to integrate their focus on eight essential skills into the Innovate for Climate Change course content.

The creativity and imagination we’re seeing from students would impress any climate tech entrepreneur or global tech giant! From reducing food waste to finding alternative ways to travel to work and reducing energy bills - we cannot wait to see more of their changemaking ideas through our Showcase this June.

As we publish this blog, we welcome news of the Department for Education’s new Sustainability and Climate Change Strategy. Innovate for Climate Change shares the Government’s goals to empower young people through better understanding climate change. We're offering a generation of students practical opportunities to develop tech innovation skills to address the climate crisis, right now.

Innovate for Climate Change will be available to all schools to deliver next academic year. Visit www.appsforgood.org/climate for more information and to register your interest.

*We define challenging circumstances as above the national average in one of the following areas: Free School Meals, English as an Additional Language or Special Educational Needs (Eng). In Scotland we use the Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation.