Event Recap: Student Innovation and the Power of Youth Engagement

During a recent trip to COP30 in Belem, Brazil, high school student Libby Ladouceur had the opportunity to hear from 31 other youth from around the world about their inspiring environmental education work.

Ladouceur and fellow Lacombe Composite High School student Broc Johnson shared their thoughts about the Centre for Global Education trip during a conversation at the Energy Transition Centre in Calgary for Canada Climate Week Xchange (CCWX) on November 29.

“There were so many neat projects that some students were doing,” Ladouceur said. “There was this one school that had made a biodegradable plastic and implemented it into their school. There’s another student who’s creating a project right now for a net-zero air filtration system within their school.”

Ladouceur, Johnson, and Stijn Tans, who joined the conversation from Lacombe, are all members of the Ecovision after-school club. Some of their initiatives include beekeeping and taking care of a greenhouse, goats, a garden, and solar panels. Their latest effort is agrivoltaics, a unique form of solar farming.

“We’re going to take some of our berry bushes and raised beds, and we are going to put a solar panel on stilts above them,” said Johnson. “What the solar panel should do is that not only will it absorb sunlight and turn it into energy, but also it’s going to provide shade to those plants, which is especially useful during the summer months when it gets really hot.”

The panel discussion was hosted by Ten Peaks Innovation Alliance, an organization that puts on an annual student conference in Red Deer, summer robotics camps, and an annual case competition.

Moderator Bill Whitelaw, CRIN member and Ten Peaks board member, joined Ten Peaks Founder and Executive Director Dagmar Knutson and Steve Schultz, board member and Lacombe Composite teacher, on the panel.

Schultz explained how they established a bee program at the school and helped develop a first-of-its-kind Canada curriculum for beekeeping that has now been shared with more than a dozen other schools.

Tans, who will be studying precision agriculture at Olds College next year, shared the message that “the stuff that we do, it’s not hard stuff.”

“It just takes time and effort,” he said.