There are two beakers on the desk, one of which contains two stones. Romy Le Hong and Valentin Zimmermann, both twelve years old, fill the beakers with water. Valentin drops two ice cubes into each of the beakers – in one of them the ice cubes land on the stones – and Romy marks the water level with a black felt-tip pen. Then they both place the glasses under a wooden frame to which a halogen spotlight is attached at the top. “So now let’s watch how the water level changes,” says teacher Nicolas von Oy. 28 children look forward excitedly at the beakers.
It is the 5th lesson at the Städtisches Willi-Graf-Gymnasium in Munich, class 7d has geography with their subject teacher. It’s about climate change. Von Oy would like the class to take a closer look at the consequences of sea level rise. The material is complex, which is why von Oy brought a tool into the classroom: the climate kit.
“The climate case is a collection of experiments that explain why the earth is warming and what effects are expected or are already visible from climate change and global warming,” explains Cecilia Scorza, who invented the climate case. She is an astrophysicist and coordinator of public relations and school offerings at the Faculty of Physics at the Ludwig Maximilians University (LMU). Her husband Harald Lesch, professor of astrophysics at the LMU and a science journalist well-known on television, also calls her “the suitcase woman”. Scorza says she developed the idea for the suitcase through conversations with her husband.
The case also includes a manual. “It’s an all-inclusive package at the most basic level imaginable, and it’s compact,” says Harald Lesch, who worked on it. “It doesn’t require a large room, but someone can come, take the suitcase, go into the classroom, set up the experiments and off we go.” The only thing you need is a faucet. The climate kit contains practically everything you need to know when talking about climate change.
The suitcase is intended for secondary schools. Together with the physics and math teacher Moritz Strähle, Cecilia Scorza developed the twelve basic experiments in the suitcase. The 7d and teacher Nicolas von Oy are experimenting with one of them.
The ice cubes have now melted under the halogen spotlight. Romy Le Hong and Valentin Zimmermann are supposed to read the water level. In the beaker without stones, the water level did not change despite the melted ice – but in the beaker with stones it did! The experiment shows that the melting of ice on land masses – here the stones – leads to a direct rise in sea level, explains von Oy to the class, who listen with fascination.
The suitcase lesson is well received by the students
Climate change affects students. “Sometimes I’m a little afraid that it can’t be undone,” says twelve-year-old Josefine Heller. And also that politicians are not taking the right measures to combat it. She thinks the topic should play a larger role in class, as well as what you can do about it yourself. She’s really enjoying her lesson with the air conditioning case so far. “I always enjoy experiments. And I also think it’s good when the experiments show how severe climate change is and how sea levels are rising, for example,” she says.
Many young people are afraid when it comes to climate change, says Cecilia Scorza. The climate kit could also help with this, because: “In order to combat fear, it is important to understand what is happening. Then we can do something,” she explains. Lesch suspects that “we would have a completely different generation of adults now” if such a climate kit had existed 30 or 35 years ago, “because they would have been confronted with it in school in a completely different way.”
The 7d students write down the observations and explanations of the experiment. “What impact do you think a sea level rise of one or two centimeters would have?” von Oy asks the class. “That doesn’t sound like much at first.” A student calls in: “That’s a lot!” Von Oy nods. He shows images of the island state of Kiribati in the Pacific, where strips of land have sunk into the sea and streets have been flooded.
“That’s an advantage of the suitcase. Complex phenomena of climate change can really be conveyed so clearly that they remain impressively in the students’ minds,” says von Oy. He often feels a sense of powerlessness when he speaks to classes about climate change. He would therefore like schools to focus more on solutions to climate change. And he suggests that more experiments that deal with climate protection measures could also be incorporated into the climate suitcase. His class thought the lesson with the suitcase was great. Josefine Heller shows the thumbs up.