Maths is at the centre of all things science, and climate change is no different. To understand climate change, scientists have measured many climatic and weather variables such as temperature, rainfall accumulations, pressure and atmospheric CO2 concentrations. Mathematical skills allow us to explore these observations, finding trends and looking at the statistics. Maths allows us to create equations that allow us to work out what will happen in the future, be it the weather for the weekend or predicting the future climate in 50 years. Maths also helps us to unpick the social science of climate change.
Solving climate change needs brainy mathematicians!
Challenge:
As part of Maths Week Scotland we are challenging secondary students in Scotland to explore the broad topic of climate change and the many possible links it has to mathematics by writing their own maths problems and questions.
This challenge will be split into two sections: writing questions and peer reviewing questions from another group/class.
Part 1: Writing questions
The Royal Meteorological Society (RMetS) has recently released the Climate Change Concept Association Tool which brings together more than three hundred climate change concepts in an engaging illustration of how they are linked.
Climate change is linked to 3 main terms – causes, policy and impacts. We are going to focus on causes and impacts.
We suggest splitting the two topics into 2 days; writing questions for causes on Monday 23rd September and impacts on Tuesday 24th September. However, the competition will be live before Scottish Maths Week so you can deliver the question making sessions when it best suits your teaching pattern.
The questions must be linked to each of the topics associated with the ‘causes’ and ‘impacts’ of climate change. The questions should be set at National 4/ 5 level in terms of mathematical skills and style.
Click below to see an example question if the topic set was ‘climate action’.
There are 8 topics associated with CAUSES (Monday):
- Climate justice
- Science
- Feedback loops
- Greenhouse gas emissions
- Land use change
- Natural variability
- Liability
- Anthropogenic
There are 24 further topics associated IMPACTS (Tuesday).
However, we are going to focus on the 10 terms in bold for the questions:
- Arctic/Antarctic
- Anthropocene
- Adaptation
- Behavioural change
- Climate zone shift
- Climate justice (already done on Monday)
- Communication
- Ecosystems
- Evidence
- Extreme weather
- Feedback loops (already done on Monday)
- Global atmospheric circulation
- Health
- Hindcasts/projections
- Individuals
- Infrastructure
- Impact assessment
- Land use change (already done on Monday)
- Migration(people)
- Oceans
- Permafrost
- Regional climate change
- Resource loss
- Society
- Social science
- Soil heath
- Small island developing states (SIDs)
We advise breaking the class into small groups (of no more than 3) and tasking each group with a couple of topics each. You will need to keep track of who worked on which questions, as there are prizes on offer – however, please don’t tell us the students’ names. For the terms that need more explanation, there is also a glossary on our website.
Part 2: Peer reviewing
You will then be given the opportunity to contribute to the reviewing process for the competition. You will score the questions written by another team/school against a number of criteria provided in the score card (which can be accessed on the competition hub). This peer reviewing process will be kept anonymous. Your peer review scores will then be combined with the expert review, undertaken by the RMetS education team and supported by Dr Frost Learning. The expert review will also include the plagiarism checks.
You will receive an email from education@rmets.org by the morning of Thursday 26th September with your assigned questions for reviewing. You will then have until Friday 4th October to complete the reviewing process. We suggest that either the whole class does all the questions and scores each question together, or similarly to the creating process, you split the class into smaller groups to focus on just a few of the questions.
The scores must then be filled in on the score card. Again, please make sure that the form is sent by a teacher or adult on behalf of the group or entrant. Return to education@rmets.org by 11pm Friday 4th October.
Prizes:
18 prizes are on offer – a £5 Amazon voucher per student for the best question written in each topic (up to £15 per group). We will contact you, the teacher/guardian, if one of your questions has won. It is then your responsibility to pass the prize on to the correct group of students who wrote the winning question.
In addition to this, each school/class which submits an entry for all 18 linked questions will be awarded with a certificate.
Future use of questions:
RMetS will add the winning questions from each topic and any other suitable questions to the bank of resources that exist on our education platform, MetLink (similar to the question provided as an example earlier in this document). The questions will be uploaded anonymously to the website, referencing that the questions were created through the Climate Calculations Challenge in collaboration Dr Frost Learning, and supported by Maths Week Scotland.
All documents for the Climate Calculations Challenge, including presentations slides and entry forms, can be found on the challenges page of the Maths Week Scotland website.
