Food, Climate, and Coding: Deploying a Climate-Hydrology-Agriculture Teaching Model to Enhance STEM Education in Underserved Rural Schools

Keywords: agriculture, crop modeling, climate change, education
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Monday
Session Start / End Time: 2/28/2022 05:20 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/28/2022 06:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 56

Abstract

Despite the growing demand for STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) professionals in the U.S. workforce, women and certain minorities remain underrepresented in STEM fields of study. STEM education that incorporates novel pedagogies and addresses pressing societal
issues such as climate change, water scarcity, and food security can be effective strategies for keeping these groups engaged. With the twofold objectives of (i) encouraging interest in science and numerical modeling among middle school to undergraduate level students and (ii) improving physical geography and climate science literacy in underserved rural high school populations, we use the SIMPLE crop model as a framework for developing a basic crop model to simulate agricultural production over critical regions of irrigated agriculture in the United States. We deploy two educational tools as components of this open-source educational model: (i) a web-based interface that allows for interaction with and visualization of various climate emissions scenarios and irrigation and crop management strategies and (ii) a downloadable model in R which allows for the design of experiments and student interaction with coding in R. With accessibility as a key characteristic of the package, we explicitly design the model to be less computationally intensive than traditional crop models. Through interaction with both the web-based visualization tool and the model code in R, students will be able to increase their coding literacy while developing a greater comprehension of the interactions between climate, crop and water resource management, and food production.