New pilot project ‘Climate Data Entrepreneurial Club’ launched for climate protection
Climate change is one of the biggest challenges facing the human race. To help young people do something about it, on 1 June Paderborn and Bochum Universities and Gesellschaft für Informatik e.V. launched the pilot project ‘Climate Data Entrepreneurial Club’ (CDEC). This project, which combines education for a digitally networked world with a commitment to climate protection, enables school students to gain expertise in informatics, earth observation and pedagogy that enables them to launch their own sustainability projects and implement them in the form of prototypes. The Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action is providing the project with around a million euros of funding for two years.
Tilman-Mathies Klar and Professor Carsten Schulte, both from the Department of Computer Science, were in charge of developing the proposal for Paderborn University. The Paderborn sub-project was awarded around 206,000 euros of funding for two years.
Participants working with real satellite data
The project is seeking to promote informatics, artificial intelligence (AI) and data analysis skills in school students in classes 10 to 13 (aged 16 to 19) using easily customisable and expandable learning modules. As part of this, students work with data from European and German satellite missions such as the Copernicus Earth observation programme and other missions including ‘EnMap’, ‘TerraSAR-X/TanDEM-X’ and the ‘Sentinel’ fleet.
The learning modules are designed to help young people handle climate data and AI-based usages and thus develop project ideas combining (environmental) informatics with sustainability. The aim is to encourage school students to found non-profit companies in order to implement their project ideas in prototype form. This will aid future professionals in the fight against climate change.
By using geographical and earth observation data and the self-effective ‘maker approach’ (based on actively and independently developing ideas), the project seeks to encourage and embolden girls and young women in particular to tackle informatics and data science, and get involved in developing solutions to combat climate change.
Results rooted in (extra-)curricular education
The project team considers it hugely important to disseminate their findings and increase exchange with politics, civil society and academia. To achieve this, they are activating a network of key players from academia, practice and education policy in order to embed the results in curricular and extra-curricular education for the long term. During the project, ‘hackathons’ – a collaborative software and hardware development event – will be paired with open workshops to clarify the needs of different stakeholder groups and enable them to incorporate the research findings into established structures.
