C-roads

C-roads

Educator Guide

You are exploring details about a digital tool. If you wish to understand how to apply this tool in teaching and improve your digital skills, we suggest starting with our Educator Guide.

Overview

C-roads is a policy simulator that allows users to test and visualize the long-term impacts of climate strategies across distinct regional groups. It demonstrates how climate actions from different countries or regions affects future outcomes such as temperature change.

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Key Features

  • Rapidly test policies

  • Real-world data

  • Climateinteractive.org provides much information and ways to use the tools.

Benefits

  • Gain inside in the world of policy-makers

  • Better understanding of what it takes to address climate change 

  • Building skills in data management, manipulation and analysis

  • Building skills in reading/interpreting maps and plotted data/graphs

  • Encourages exploration

  • Inspires problem-solving

How these features can be used in the classroom to enhance teaching and learning

Test existing policies on whether they are enough to stabilize temperatures below 2 degrees celsius. Try to create policies based on different priorities and compare them and their outcomes.

Getting Started

  1. Potentially visit the tool's guide first.

  2. Select graphs – When you first open C-ROADS, you see the two default graphs. You can select from the full list of graphs by clicking the title of the left or right graph. You can also select from the Graphs menu in the top toolbar.

  3. Select regions mode - You can select the number of regions by clicking on the simulation button.

  4. More info – For more information about a graph and what it shows, select the triangle icon to the left of the graph title.

  5. Input table - Here, the user can enter values and watch the model calculate their impacts on the outcome.

  6. Copy graph data – Copy the graph data to your clipboard by clicking on the three dots to the right of the graph title and selecting “Copy Data to Clipboard.” You can paste this data into a spreadsheet program such as Excel.

  7. Shortcut to popular graphs – You can quickly jump to a selection of the most commonly used graphs from the “Show miniature graphs” icon on the top toolbar. You can click any of these miniature graphs to switch to that graph in the main graph view.

  8. View larger graphs – If you want to expand one of the graphs to be larger or into a separate window, you can access this by clicking on the three dots to the right of the graph title and select “View Larger” or “View in New Window.” You can access our “Large Left Graph” or “Large Right Graph” feature from the View menu in the top toolbar.

Considerations and potential concern of using the tool

  • Learn to understand how the tool works and what the settings mean.

  • The graphs or maps can sometimes be a bit too abstract.

  • Discuss the different consequences the changing of factors can have and what do the outcomes in the graphs mean?

  • Clearly frame or explain the goal/assignment by setting boundaries and limitations for the sliders. Otherwise they can be a bit overwhelming.