Abstract
Objective. For creating a sustainable society, it is important to change citizen’s life style and sense of values. Environmental education is expected as a way of solving those problems. The authors have developed an environmental education program using educational LCA software “global warming even in your bag?!,” which aims to make learners realize the link between our daily life and global warming based on life-cycle thinking, and has implemented the program in several junior high and high schools. While the effectiveness of the program was demonstrated through the implementation, some problems to be solved for the wide use of the program in the future came to light. The present study aims to identify points to be improved in the program to newly develop more effective software for the program.
Results and Discussion. Analysis on students’ impression and teacher’s comments obtained from the program implementation in the past reveals that it is necessary (1) to more emphasize the link between our daily life and global warming, (2) to reduce the burden of teachers, and (3) to improve life cycle CO2 emission calculation. In order to solve the three problems, new software “global warming even in your bag?! Ver. 2” is designed and developed. First, “life cycle flow screens” are introduced so that learners can study various product life-cycles only using the software. Second, graphical user interfaces (GUIs) are improved in view of user-friendliness for both teachers and learners. Third, life cycle CO2 emissions are calculated more appropriately reflecting the characteristics of products.
Conclusions. An environmental education program using “global warming even in your bag?! Ver.2” is expected to be more effective for realizing the link between our daily life and global warming based on life-cycle thinking, and for reducing the burden of teachers. Actually, a teacher who implemented the programs using Ver. 1 and Ver. 2 offered the comment that the use of Ver. 2 allowed for giving a lecture more smoothly compared to Ver. 1.
