EOSC 114#

Official course description#

The Catastrophic Earth: Natural Disasters: Introduction to causes and physical characteristics of disasters such as volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes, storm surge, thunderstorms, tornadoes, landslides, wind waves, meteor impacts, mass extinctions. [3-0-0] Corequisite: EOSC 111 is recommended.

Links: >Home, >UBC Calendar, >ubcexplore.

OCESE project objectives#

  1. Develop and implement an interactive exercise that engages students in the complexity of the relationship between Earth’s processes, its climate, human activity and impacts on society.

Actions taken#

Discussions between OCESE educational development staff and both teaching assistants & instructors went as far as describing a mind-map or flow-chart approach to enabling students to confront the “cause-and-effect” nature of natural processes that can be hazardous to societies. Driving questions were:

  • “In what ways can climate change increase the severity and/or frequency of natural hazards earthquakes?” and

  • “Does this hazard affect global climate?”

The expression of initial design work is in a powerpoint slide sequence, here in PPTX and PDF formats.

A first draft HTML5 interactivity of this climate-mind-map was developed. Github repo. Instructors wanted to do a “paper” activity based on these ideas first. No further action within OCESE time-frame.

Lessons learned#

Instructors had little time to be creative during COVID and only used the Global Temperature dashboard because it was completed for other courses. That’s OK - people can only apply energy when time and inclination permit.