Building Bridges?

Greetings Kenya! It was a concern all these past months that our website wasn't getting any visits from the place our work was inspired by. Its lovely to see that we have now had some visitors from Kenya.

All too often, and everyone realises this, we Europeans and North Americans think we can solve everyone's problems all over the world but, of course, we can't.

I hope this drop of visitors from Africa will become a trickle and that the trickle becomes a steady stream. Wouldn't it be wonderful if all the streams around the world then joined to form an unstoppable river flowing into the oceans?

Could you please let us know what we need to do to cross the desert?

Postscript: Mikasa 3

The final Science for Sustainability newsletter, Mikasa 3, is now available. It is a 2 page pdf detailing the final throes of the project.

Thank You!

Alas, the main development phase of Science for Sustainability is at an end.

We wish to thank all who have taken part or have expressed an interest. This includes:

• Derek Raine (piCETL Director, UoL)
• Kuzvinetsa Dzvimbo (Rector, AVU 2003-2007)
  
• All at the African Virtual University (including Peter Bateman and Amanda Hopkins)
• The Higher Education Academy - Education for Sustainable Development Small Projects Team (including Heather Witham)
  
• The UoL Teaching Enhancement Forum (including Liz Grant and John Fothergill)
  
• The UoL I-Science Team (including Jan Zalasiewicz, Alan Cann, Sarah Symons and David Harper)
• The HEA Physical Sciences Subject Centre (including Paul Chin)
  
• Andy Johnston at Forum for the Future
  
• Eddie Morrison (Environment and Ecology Graduate, UoL)
  
• Divaker Shikotra (Physics Graduate, UoL and his sister!)
• Tracey Parker (UoL, piCETL Outreach Officer)
  
• Victoria Bennett (Postdoc, Forestry and Natural Resources, Purdue University, U.S.A.
  
• Emily Perkins (Physics Teacher, Wreake Valley Community College)
• The UoL Physics Undergraduate competition entrants
• Pupils at Wreak Valley Community College
• Anne Price (Physics Teacher) and pupils at Leicester Grammar School
• and everyone else we came across along the way!

It has been an interesting 9 months or so. Has it only been that long? It seems so much has happened. When we started Education for Sustainable Development seemed relatively unknown, in the UK at least. Now its on everyone's lips!

We've had a lot of fun with the project but its been very hard work too! There will be time later for more meaningful reflection...

For now, the next 'phase' of the project has moved to:

www.ourplanetearth.org

We sincerely wish you all the best with your own work. Thanks again for being interested in ours. Please do stay in touch!

Very best wishes,



The s4s team.

Many Voices

One of the most surprising aspect of s4s is how much people jump on board. This was always the whole point and we’ve worked hard to encourage this but its still a revelation when something spontaneous happens which was never planned or even imagined.

Recently we took the games we developed in the competition to local schools.

The first school our road show (!) visited was Wreake Valley Community College where our long time collaborator Emily Perkins teaches Physics. Eddie Morrison (Research Assistant), Sarah Jones (Physics Undergraduate), Emma Tebbs (Physics Undergraduate) and Tracey Parker (I-Science Outreach Officer) as well as Emily all lent a hand. Fifteen ‘mixed’ young people at the College came along to play the games. We were surprised by the great ideas they had to make the games more playable.

The second school the road show stopped at was Leicester Grammar School. Eddie, Mrs. Anne Price (Physics Teacher) and Sarah Jones again all helped out. Eight again ‘mixed’ young people were really interested in the games.

In terms of popularity we reckon the ranking for the games is:

1. Fish Eagle

2. Survival
3. Henry’s Game
4. Jumbe

Eddie has been working hard on adding all of the new ideas to the games! These are about to be unveiled at the Higher Education Academy, Education for Sustainable Development conference in Bradford tomorrow (Tuesday 10th July) and Wednesday. In fact this post is being written the night before!

The next, really important, stage is to now package everything together ready for TESSA/the AVU to make them available to yet more voices in Sub-Saharan Africa.

We are really looking forward to what these truly crucial voices also have to say!

Thanks so much to all who have been involved so far.

Mikasa!

Hey everyone,

Mikasa 2 has finally been placed on the s4s website. Thanks a lot to Eddie Morrison for putting this together.

If you have any questions you could leave a comment here?

Cheers.

Come Together!

On Thursday, 7th of June a number of us involved in Science for Sustainability (s4s) came together to see how things have been going.

Actually, the 12 of us who are students at Leicester were there to see who had won the recent competition!

As previously mentioned, the competition was to:

1. Think about Sustainable Development (in Africa).
2. Model African Sustainable 'Complex Systems'.
3. Design a fun, educational game to illustrate these.

We've had Progress, Interdisciplinary Science team, Student and other smaller meetings; formal, informal, face-to-face and online. However, this was the first time that some of these different people came together!

The whole point of s4s is (to use the lingo) to form a 'community of practice' through 'participatory action research'. In other words, the aim is to invite lots of different people to become involved as a 'community'. This is never going to be easy since we're all (thankfully!) so very different! So, helping to make this work has become a big part of the project.

Given this you can see why it is so satisfying to see all of these different people sitting in the same room, discussing Sustainability and having fun!

We believe that the kinds of problems we may be trying to solve in Sustainable Development will only start to be worked towards when lots of different kinds of people are given a chance to contribute.

By-the-way, "Team Rabs" won the competition but it was very close! Everyone did really well for various reasons, which was the whole point.

All of the games will soon be played at local schools to see what the people who will really count think. The plan then is to 'bundle' everything together - learning materials, methods and competition results - for use by the African Virtual University, Open Educational Resources team in the TESSA project around Sub-Saharan Africa.

Thus, our hope is that more people can begin to come together and add their own voices to what Sustainable Development may really mean?

The Eagle Has Landed!

Rather pleasingly it looks like we have four varied student team entries for the s4s competition to develop a game for Sustainable Development.

The more I think about Sustainable Development, the more I talk to and listen to others and the more that happens on our planet earth then the more I appreciate that there's a whole range of views as to what Sustainability actually is...

I do feel that some of the views sometimes appear far from the mark, that is, so radically diverge from my own views that they can't possible be 'right'?

However, I think it would be extremely difficult to answer the question "What is Sustainable Development?" For, it seems, it is so many different things to so many different peoples. Nobody has a definitive version of the answer to this difficult question. Presumably this is because of the complexity/variation necessarily central to a consideration of this challenge?

The four competition entrants will provide us with quite a challenge, particularly given this relativistic position, when we try to decide a 'winner'.

As clichéd as this will sound they are all indeed already winners!

Cheers,

Tim :-)

May Day!

Well hopefully tomorrow - May 1st (auspicious by anyone's reckoning) - we'll be starting the s4s competition. I won't tempt fate by saying much for the moment.

Enjoy the unseasonal weather in the UK.

Tim :-)

Where Are We?

So, we should now have 5 teams of 3 people who are willing to lend a hand with the project. They will participate in the Moodle version of the competition after the Easter vacation. Again, the idea is that they'll be working in their teams to collaboratively

1. Think about what Sustainability really is
2. Begin to model the complexities of Sustainability
3. Develop a game based on the model

They will then write a short report about all their experiences which will be used by the judges to determine the 'winner'. The winner's game will hopefully then go out to local schools to see how it fares in the Real World. Finally, all the methods and learning materials will be documented for use by the African Virtual University in their TESSA project (many thanks to the TESSA team for allowing us to participate).

We'll let you know how things are progressing. Right now though we're all going to take a well-earned rest! :-)

Ready, steady...go!

We're now in the position of having a model and potential game idea which we'd like students at Leicester to test (ideally in the Physics Department but do let us know if you're interested and from elsewhere).

We've set a competition where the winners each get 100 pounds and everyone who takes part gets 50 pounds. We need 5 teams of 3 really. You can send Tim an email with the subject line 's4s competition' indicating your willingness to take part and the names and emails of your three team mates!

You may also notice we have a newsletter which we've call Mikasa where you can quickly get up-to-speed with where we are with the project.

Thanks for everyone's interest so far and best of luck with your own efforts for sustainability!

Big Chief!

Here's D and Eddie playing the s4s game 'Big Chief'. The egg boxes contain various counters such as seeds and sweets. The central box represents parameters in the environment and we each have our own box representing our village. We then work through the game rules to see how our choices, such as how much land and fertiliser to use for crops, cascade around the environment.

We had a bit of fun but since we were also working out the order of the rules and other such game mechanics it was quite tiring. We managed just three years in about an hour and a half!

Next we'll be asking students at Leicester to develop their own games, based on the videos and other learning materials. Then these games will hopefully be used in local schools.

Help!

Dear friends,

As part of Science for Sustainability we've been working on a model loosely based upon Lake Naivasha, as shown in the videos below. The model is simply an Excel spreadsheet, a trick I picked up at NECSI. Its to be used as the basis for a game design and shows chiefs and their villagers plus various aspects of the 'environment' such as fish in a lake and neighbouring eagles. The idea then is that all these parameters are interlinked thus demonstrating the complexity of 'ecosystems' (in the broadest sense).

So I have a version for MS Excel which I'm fairly happy with - at least it demonstrates the approach (it will be down to local groups to develop their own model and subsequent game) - and I have a version which works in Documents to Go on Palm OS.

We are hoping that the learning materials we develop will now feed into TESSA, at least we are talking about this. However, we cannot assume that everyone in Sub-Saharan Africa has access to MS Excel as its cost may be prohibitive.

Hence, we'd like to convert Big Chief to Open Office format. Which is where we would like you to help please?

I tried last night but couldn't get the charts making sense. I also removed circular references where the first year's "plants" for instance take their value from the last years - this was throwing up an error (523 I think).

Charts which would be useful include:

• chiefs populations - of the 3 villages
• environmental populations - eagles, fish, fertiliser and bank
• crops - for the 3 villages
• 'external' variables - sun, rain, war and disease

If anyone is a whiz at Open Office or just has some spare time to take a look we'd appreciate it. If you do get something reasonable then please just post a comment here and we'll sort out how to add it to the project.

Cheers,

Tim

A Lake on the Edge: The Future of Lake Naivasha

Here's an index to each of the short films about Lake Naivasha on YouTube. They are all around 5-6 minutes duration.

Part 1: The Heart of the Lake.

Part 2: The Aliens Are Coming!

Part 3: People and Pollution.

Part 4: What Can We Do?

Part 5: Our Planet Earth.

A Lake on the Edge: The Future of Lake Naivasha, Part 1

This is the first of a series of short videos we are planning to use for our project. The original film was written by Dr. David Harper, an ecologist at the University of Leicester with around 25 years experience in Kenya.

The whole of the series is now available on YouTube, see the 'playlist'.

Further learning materials are currently being evaluated, such as a simple computer model of Lake Naivasha and a game based upon this.

Our intention is that all these materials will form part of a Problem-Based Learning (PBL) scenario, something which we have some expertise in at the University of Leicester.

I hope you enjoy the videos - please do leave comments on YouTube!

Cheers,

Tim

"Very likely"

So we are probably contributing to Global Warming through our combined effects upon the planet since Industrialisation according to the IPCC.

There's a nice piece on the BBC website by a lady from the MET Office about computer models.

Complexity of Sustainable Development

I was fortunate enough to attend the NESCI Winter School over the past couple of weeks in Cambridge, MA in the U.S. It was a very informative and productive 2 weeks as well as being a lot of fun! The way I've seen it for some time now the number of systems which interrelate when one considers Sustainable Development leads to a great deal of complexity. Complexity Science therefore, we may assume, would give us some handle on how to deal with this complexity.

So, it turns out, the science of Complexity does indeed provide a number of tools and methods of analysis. Examples of the former would include modelling and examples of the latter would include networks. To illustrate, aside from the classes at NECSI from 9 to 5 each day every evening was spent on group work.

Our group in week 1 investigated issues concerning social capital and intervention strategies to alleviate 'social exclusion' (another interest of mine and also of some interest to this project). We developed a model and wrote a paper on the theoretical background.

However, of more relevance here, our group in week 2 investigated Global Warming. So, getting back to Complexity Science methods:


Firstly we realised that it is important to manage knowledge in Education for Sustainable Development. Hence, we developed a semantic network (as a form of ontology) of the knowledge we were researching and integrating into the NECSI Wiki. It is called Global Warming Ecosystem Brain or G-WEB.

Secondly, we developed a model, named atmosmodel, which helped us to develop our theories resulting from our newly researched knowledge of Global Warming. I likened this to the process of acquisition, argumentation and application I talk about in my PhD thesis.

We did not have long at all to carry out this work so it is all in its early stages. However, the whole course proved to be useful for 'Science for Sustainability'. In fact, as a means of developing the game tool kit which we are proposing will be the centrepiece of this project, I would like to explore the development of a simple model.

All in all this was two weeks well spent with a whole host of ideas gained in a very short space of time. Furthermore, some intelligent and quite dedicated people got to cross-fertilise their varying ideas about Complexity Science which in itself made the whole trip incredibly worthwhile.