Free Software for Understanding Sustainable Development
Sustainable development involves complex, interdisciplinary issues that would be impossible to bring to precollege education without technology. Education for a Sustainable Future, a project of The Concord Consortium's Center for a Sustainable Future, has developed three new software tools for visualizing and exploring possible futures.
What-If Builder
The What-If Builder is a tool to create decision-tree models, also known as "Action Mazes," "tree literature," "plot branching," or "choose your own adventure." A model consists of short sections of narrative, each ending with a choice for the reader that determines what happens next.
Visual Community Designer
The Visual Community Designer is a spatial modeling and visualization tool for community design and evaluation. You define the objects of the model, such as houses, and the variables associated with the objects, such as number of people or water usage. Variables can be set to default averages, or customized for specific objects, such as "my house." Visualization tools let you do calculations over a community (e.g., total population, electricity use, jobs available, unemployment rate) and perform "what if" experiments (e.g., the net effect of everyone turning their thermostat down a degree or using public transportation).
Ecological Footprint Calculator
The Ecological Footprint Calculator measures our use of nature by calculating how much land is required to produce all of the resources we consume, and absorb all of the waste we produce. The concept is described in the book "Our Ecological Footprint: Reducing Human Impact on the Earth" by William Rees and Mathis Wackernagel. We are developing the Ecological Footprint Calculator as a tool for students to calculate their own ecological footprint, and to visualize their footprint in various ways. The tool also provides information to students about how the ecological footprint is calculated, and what are the different land uses that make up their footprint (crops, grazing land, forest, developed land, etc.).
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