This year's Salesforce's Davos Codes was yet another that I am proud to be involved with. Check out the video here and if you're interested in a bit more background to the activities the students enjoyed, read on.
For the 7th year, U Can Too supported Salesforce by leading the curriculum development and delivery for students of Davos Realschule in their Climate Action Lab (Davos CAL) sessions. This year's focus was building awareness about avalanches and how scientists use seismometers in avalanche research (alongside other sensors).
Before the World Economic Forum
Across the year before the World Economic Forum, the Davos CAL students learnt about ground motion detection using seismometers built from Lego (thanks to the kit produced by Mindsets Online). Students connected their Lego seismometers to Raspberry Pi computers and then developed a Python program to capture seismic data sensed by their seismometer. Once set up, students used their devices to capture data relating to a range of interesting seismic sources, which they will go on to visualise and compare in Tableau.
During the World Economic Forum
In addition to the Lego seismometers, during the World Economic Forum students shared a Raspberry Shake with the local Institute for Snow and Avalance Research (SLF) in Davos. Scientist Alec Van Herwijnen generously gave time and space to this additional seismometer, adjusting it before deploying it to one of the SLF study plots. There, the students' Raspberry Shake seismometer shares data globally and will hopefully capture avalanche and earthquake data.
Alongside all this, the new cohort of Davos CAL students continued using existing CAL equipment, the wildlife cameras, to become more aware of the wildlife in their local area. They even captured video of wolves that have recently returned to the region! Students recorded and shared their observations on the iNaturalist platform following the curriculum developed by naturebytes for the Climate Action Lab programme. This year's cohort of students more than doubled the number of observations recorded by the previous cohort and nearly tripled the number of species recorded by their predecessors!
The Davos Codes event hosted by Salesforce at the World Economic Forum is an opportunity for students to celebrate their achievements and share knowledge gained with others. We always try to use technology with students in new or unusual ways. This year, students shared their knowledge of avalanches in an automated avalanche simulator powered by micro:bits, and we took one of the students' Lego seismometers and attached it to a target with a collection of accelerometers. Why? To build a Snowball-o-meter, of course! None of this would happen without Salesforce, who conceived the Davos Codes programme, engaged with the school and brought together the team to develop the Climate Action Lab content. If you'd like to know more about the Climate Action Lab curriculum developed by U Can Too and naturebytes, please feel free to get in touch!