Five ways Innovate for Climate Change supports the new Curriculum for Wales

The new Curriculum for Wales aims to prepare young people to become “confident, capable and compassionate citizens”. Launching this September (2022), the visionary curriculum looks to empower young people to be active in their learning, engaged with their community and to be competent with technology. At Apps for Good we believe that young people can shape their future through technology – they just need the support, skills, inspiration and pathway to make it happen. That’s why we’re excited at the ambition of the new Curriculum for Wales and how it chimes perfectly with our new Innovate for Climate Change (ICC) course.

We’ve outlined five areas where the new Curriculum for Wales and Innovate for Climate Change work in perfect harmony:

Science and Technology Area for Learning and Experience (AoLE) is one of the new curriculum’s six mandatory AoLEs. The ICC course brings together the two taught disciplines of Science and Technology into one course through its focus on climate change and technology. ICC reflects the new curriculum's cross-curricular ambitions where students can “build connections across their learning and combine different experiences, knowledge and skills”. With lots of detail in the session plans, this course can be taught by a computing teacher without a science specialism.

One focus of the Science and Technology AoLE’s Statements of what matters is where “Design thinking and engineering offer technical and creative ways to meet society’s needs and wants”. The ICC course encourages students to create a climate action app based on the needs of a community relevant to them, and to create the app for its identified users employing Universal Design principles on accessibility and inclusion. Another focus in the Statements of what matters is “Computation is the foundation for our digital world”. The premise of the ICC course, and a central tenet of the Apps for Good approach, is that technology can be harnessed for social good.

The mandatory Humanities AoLE particularly speaks to the ICC course which seeks to “awaken a sense of wonder, fire the imagination and inspire learners to grow in knowledge, understanding and wisdom”. In ICC, through enquiry, students are exposed to ideation, real-world approaches, decision-making and feedback from industry experts, as well as creating an app within a social context.

One of the three mandatory cross-curricular skills in the new curriculum for Wales across all AoLEs, is digital competence. Digital competency is underpinned throughout the ICC course and meets the requirements of the new curriculum through “communication; collaboration; and storing and sharing”, “Producing, which includes planning, sourcing and searching; creating; and evaluating and improving” as well as developing computer programs using computational thinking. See the Digital Competence Framework (DCF) for further details.

The integral skills of Creativity and innovation, Critical thinking and problem-solving, Personal effectiveness and Planning and organising underpin the new curriculum. Throughout the ICC course, young people have the opportunity to develop these skills to succeed in education, employment and wider life.

The Innovate for Climate Change course is available now and thanks to the generous support of our partners, it is 100% free of charge to schools. We’ve built in a short teacher training session, so it’s easy for you to pick up and deliver. You can access the course and the teacher training via this link.

Update, March 2023: Innovate for Climate Change is now also available in Welsh. Contact us at education@appsforgood.org if you'd like to access the Welsh version of the course.

This blog was authored by Dr Emma Posey, Senior Learning Manager at Apps for Good.