Students at Susquehanna University spent their semester breaking down some of that research and turning it into children’s books.
SNYDER COUNTY, Pa. — Inside the Natural Sciences Center building on Susquehanna University’s campus, Professor Siobhan Fathel and student Jordan Bender are looking over some of the climate storybooks others created in the class this semester.
Fathel teaches the Climate and Global Change class and says this idea came after she was thinking about ways students could communicate the information they were learning.
“I thought the most extreme example, but a fun one, could be “Could you take the scientific literature, could you take a peer review journal article and convert it into a children’s book?,” said Prof. Siobhan Fathel, Earth and Environmental Sciences, Susquehanna University.
Fathel says it could be anything from changing weather patterns to how animal habitats are changing.
Senior Jordan Bender says she already had an idea of what she wanted to do her storybook on when the assignment was given.
She says she read articles where the author compared global warming to the Earth getting sick. Once she chose the topic, she then had to create a storyboard.
“I wrote When the Earth Gets Sick, and it’s pretty much about the Earth. She wakes up and is feeling really hot and not well. Over the course of the day, she experiences all these symptoms that are extreme weather events,” said Jordan Bender, Susquehanna University senior.
As far as how the books were illustrated, students could choose from a variety of different ways from Canva to handwriting, but also AI.
“It really lowered that barrier for them, and they were able to see too that generative AI can do so much more, and maybe instead of it just answering questions, it could tell their stories and help them communicate better.” said Fathel.
Bender says being able to see everything come together was exciting after all the hard work and hopes her book inspires empathy for the Earth, “If children grow up caring about the Earth, realizing what’s going on and then they’ll grow up with that empathy of, ‘The Earth shouldn’t feel like this, we shouldn’t be doing this’ and it will stay with them.”
The books can be found in the library on campus at Susquehanna University.
Professor Fathel says she was very impressed with the student’s work on this project and hopes to do it again next year.