The Environmental Design Challenge is an ecology mitigation simulation, crafted for students aged 15-18. The EDC will duplicate the experience of working as a member of a team from within the ecology industry. Learners will draw up teams, elect officers and confer and cooperate to produce a viable solution to an environmental problem. The Challenge will conclude with the teams’ detailed slide presentations of their solutions to a panel of judges. The judges, including academics and experts in the field, are charged with choosing a winning team.
The following are examples of environmental issues to be solved:
- Reducing heat islands in cities;
- Conserving water in soon-to-be uninhabitable desert regions;
- Preventing wildfires in and near forested territories;
- Creating a future ocean-side city that averts flooding;
- Examining best practices in agriculture to prevent topsoil loss, floods & droughts;
- Protecting animals from global warming;
- Limiting human migration caused by climate change.
The Environmental Design Challenge—along with its ancillary programme, Eco Meet—hopes to accomplish the following:
- Encourage student autonomy through self-directed learning;
- Advance participants’ knowledge in the field of environmental science;
- Hone attendees’ technical competence, management skills, knowledge of ecospheres and resources, appreciation for relationships between technical products and human use, teamwork and techniques for preparing effective documentation;
- Prepare these youth to be attractive to future employers through practical experience in a multitude of fields;
- Galvanise students to tackle the principal challenge of our century, thereby benefitting their immediate community, the larger world and themselves.