Over the past two days, Coppell High School astronomy and earth & space science teacher Angela Barnes’ classes have been presenting over the United Nations 17 Global Goals in the library, and what initiatives they took in the community to reach them. 

This process, starting in the second nine weeks of last semester, started with the students doing in-depth research on a global goal of their choice. After creating a short documentary about the information behind their goal, the students either chose to work with other people with similar goals or by themselves to raise awareness for the project. 

The students did so through a variety of platforms, such as Twitter accounts, Go Fund Me campaigns and a bingo card of actions you can do to help the goal that was passed out to people.   

Alongside presenting before Barnes and the class, they also presented in front of Thomas Darwin, who is a member of the Climate Reality Project, who provided feedback for them. Darwin shared about the issue of climate change in relation to voting, and highly encouraged students, many of them seniors who are 18, to vote to support candidates who would take action regarding climate change, something that was directly relevant to the U.N. goals and their presentations.

“These couple days in the library have been their opportunity to share what their goal was, and how they did make a difference, not how they’re going to in the future, but how they already have, this semester, done something to either raise money or raise awareness or raise goods and services for a cause they are passionate about,” Barnes said. 

These projects were very interactive and encouraged students to reach out to many different people, such as the people in their neighborhoods, and professionals in the topic they chose to study for the project. 

“What I hope they get out of this, not only in finding a passion and having their eyes open for global concerns that are everywhere that will need to be tackled, just understanding how we need to focus on sustainability for our future and all living things on the planet,” Barnes said. 

The project allowed students to truly understand the impact of their lives on the planet. 

“I loved working with my group on this project and learned a lot,” said CHS senior Jenny Baggett, who’s group focused on clean energy usage. “I learned about sustainable energy and our collective impact on the environment. I knew that our carbon footprint was an issue, but I really discovered the magnitude of the issue after the project was assigned,”

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