Carbon Passport

Carbon Passport is a small group project for high school life, earth, or environmental science classes. Students create a table top game in which players act as carbon atoms that cycle through the earth’s atmosphere, biosphere, hydrosphere, and geosphere in both biotic and abiotic forms. Students enjoy flexibility in choosing the format of their game (board game, dice, cards, tiles, etc.) but must meet certain criteria according to a rubric. They must include certain forms of carbon and specific processes that transform carbon into another form. Furthermore, students must differentiate between human activities and natural processes. High quality projects will include mechanisms to show how human activities affect the concentration of carbon in certain forms/spheres. During my summer fellowship, the researchers I worked most closely with focused on treating wastewater to remove carbon in the form of methane and organic molecules containing nitrogen; therefore, wastewater provides an example of how biogeochemical cycles are interconnected with one another and are affected by human activity.