Memo+2

The Environmental Protection Agency has produced multiple educational activities through their AirNow website to try and teach air pollution to young children. The AirNow website is supported by the EPA and state, local, tribal, and international environmental agencies to provide AQI statistics for many locations. The EPA’s mission statement is to protect Americans from environmental health hazards, enforce federal standards, and provide scientific information about the environment. Overall the main educational goal of the EPA is to advocate environmental protection and to highlight health risks.

One educational module through the EPA is Air Quality for Kids, which provides information on what the Air Quality Index actually is. Its main goals are to introduce the quantitative meaning behind the AQI and what the health concerns about air quality are. It also provides a brief section about lowering air pollution with related links. The module consists of mainly text with pictures and uses extremely simplified language for the target age group of 7-10, which I believe distracts from the education potential of the curriculum. The slides avoid any mention of what actually makes the air dirty beside ozone and particulates, and only brushes over the source of pollutants. The curriculum does do a good job of introducing the different ways air quality data can be presented and what number of particles and health concerns each color corresponds to. The information is accompanied with two interactive games, an AQI game show and AQI color game. The game show has good questions like “Children are a sensitive group because their lungs are still …”, but the provided choices do not require enough higher level thinking by providing answer choices like “sleeping, developing, or on the phone”. The AQI color game is slightly more challenging and requires a strong understanding of the meaning behind the AQI index. The curriculum is rather weak in reaching Eco-Literacies, for example is does help people understand their health, but it makes no attempt to connect it to any distance causes. This curriculum could be improved by providing more scientific data about what kind of particles are considered pollution, why they are harmful, where they come from, and what can be done about it. The questions from the Game Show could be improved by making them more open ended. Also including more information about why the AQI was developed would help increasing understanding about the role of government and what kind of science is needed to produce such an index.