- The Clean Air Challenge Mission
- The Clean Air Challenge strives to provide an excellent, substantive, curriculum-based air quality education program for teachers and students around the world. Through our partners and sponsors, we work to offer the CAC curriculum, its materials, and its rigorous teacher training to every classroom for free.
What Is The Clean Air Challenge?
The Clean Air Challenge provides a three to six week hands on science curriculum designed for grades six through twelve. The focus of the curriculum is air pollution, including carbon dioxide, ozone and particulates and how it can be mitigated. It shows the amount of greenhouse gas emissions produced for ten different fuels, including gasoline, but focusing on alternatives such as electricity, hybrids or fuel cells.
The strength of this program is that it leads students to discover the effect burning fossil fuels can have on our atmosphere and how this can affect their health and climate change. It then empowers students to change their habits to influence the future in a more positive way.
The program helps science teachers meet science standards while enabling students to conduct scientific research on an environmental problem that impacts their health and the environment. The 2-to-3 week unit is divided into 5 parts:
- Does air pollution affect people? Students measure the size of their lungs, engage in an activity where they learn about particulate matter and how variously sized pollution particles impact the human respiratory and circulatory systems, and they witness the creation of ozone and its effect on different materials.
- What is air pollution? How is it formed? Students learn how the EPA determines if counties and regions are meeting air quality standards and they study the chemical reactions that form ground-level ozone and explore sources of pollution.
- Can the amount of air pollution be measured? Is air pollution a problem in our community? Students do a lab on emissions concentration, which illuminates the EPA’s parts-per-million standard for ozone. They use test cards to measure ozone concentrations around their school building, followed by going to an EPA website to view historic ozone levels in their area.
- Can we make better choices to clean up our air? Students learn how ground level ozone can result from emissions of NOx and VOC from cars and trucks, and then are introduced to alternative fuels that produce lower emissions of NOx and VOC including CNG, EVs, gasoline/electric hybrid vehicles, hydrogen, LPG, ethanol, and RFG. They then conduct a series of lab activities to evaluate each of these alternative fuels and vehicles and ultimately select their favorite.
- What conclusions can we draw from our study? Students analyze the data they have collected on the seven alternative fuels (and vehicles), then draw conclusions and write essays on:
- What is your favorite fuel? Why? What needs to happen, if anything, to make this fuel more widely used?
- How can people in your community be convinced to travel less, by more energy-efficient means, and in less-polluting vehicles?
The Clean Air Challenge History
The Clean Air Challenge started in 1995 with energy author Jack Lord. Since its first printing in 1997, CAC has been revised several times to broaden its academic strengths and hone its approach to air quality education. In the past two years alone, the Clean Air Challenge has trained more than 3,000 teachers and reached over 360,000 students. Through the support of CAC's many sponsors, the program is now being offered in five states (California, Colorado, Delaware, Texas & Nevada) and two foreign countries (China and India). Our hope and expectation is that the program will continue to grow so that more teachers can expose their students to the important concepts of air quality and the science methodology that will drive the next generation of environmental and industry leaders.
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