Carbon Offsets

Carboffsets500I created this set of pages as part of a larger effort to give my APES students more opportunity to practice math related to energy in released FRQs. Ā As for the other sets in this project, I used the index page as a way to learn how to meld animations I’ve found online into my pages, and of course, to give my students a bit of fun šŸ™‚ Ā In this case, before beginning work to solve the math problems, take a moment and “cut” a snowflake then watch it unfold to sparkly perfection.

I recently updated each of the five pages linked to fromĀ the main “snowflake maker” page. Ā In updating these pages, I focused on refining the CSS (now I am trying everything out using Chrome inspector before I make changes in my index file or CSS file) so that:

— the background image of a forest displays.

— the text has a semi-transparent background that is the width of the text plus a bit of padding.

— increasing the font of the input buttons and adding semi-transparent background to the solutions, both of which meant manipulating the agent styles.

— the background has curved borders (which necessitated giving the top and bottom list items separate id’s to avoid curving the internal list items.

Back to the controversial topic of carbon offsets. Ā On the surface, it appears to be an environmental slam dunk. Ā Trees suck up carbon dioxide, lots of trees live in forests, so saving a forest will suck up the carbon we emit to the air burning fossil fuels, making plastics, etc. Ā Turns out, like so much else, the reality of offsetting one’s carbon emissions by conserving forests is complicated and the science supporting this approach is not solid. Ā Read this articleĀ and this opinion to gainĀ more perspective on the complexity of offsetting carbon emissions through forest conservation.

Personally, I think these pages look really cool now šŸ™‚

March 14, 2016 UPDATE! Ā Angular JS!!

Here is a link to a new version of this activity made using Angularjs