In summer 2010, the University of North Dakota (UND) hosted an internship for undergraduates to learn about climate change in both the classroom and group research projects. As a final project, the undergraduates were tasked to present their findings about different aspects of climate change in webcasts that would be later used in middle school classrooms in the region. The internship was very successful, and UND is currently partnering with University of Texas, San Antonio, to implement a similar internship in several Texas colleges.

Lesson plans that complement the student-produced webcasts and adhere to regional and national standards were created during the spring and summer 2011. These lesson plans were reviewed during a teacher workshop in August and are currently being tested in classrooms. Communication between scientists and K-12 education researchers was found to be a challenge, but improved over the course of the project. Assessment of the lesson plan development process and preliminary results from in-class testing of the modules will be presented.

As lesson plans were being developed, we found that introducing global climate models (GCMs) and issues of uncertainty at a middle school level was particularly challenging. Development of a supplemental lesson to tackle this challenge has become a project led by one of the 2010 undergraduate interns. Modules that have been developed to teach about GCMs and uncertainty will be presented, including play-acting of model integration (“the human atmospheric model”), focused use of Columbia University's educational GCM (EdGCM), and companion webcasts.