Classroom activities

Audit a claim and compare decisions

You’ll need: Core lesson or experience evaluating scientific claims.

You’ll produce: A claim audit and a decision memo that separates evidence from priorities.

1. Select a published-source value in the factor ledger. Follow the link and reproduce its extraction, units and boundary. Record anything you cannot verify.
2. Compare it with an authored case. Do not treat the two as endpoints of a statistical confidence interval.
3. Read two company disclosure rows. Identify mismatched years, scopes and unavailable data; explain why they cannot establish a simple ranking.
4. Use the hypothetical resource-management case in the teacher/student packet. Compute annual electricity, water and the cost per kWh saved for both options.
5. Choose an option using explicit criteria. Discuss cost, local water scarcity, and evidence limits. Explain how different priorities could support another choice.
6. Identify evidence that would change your recommendation. Submit an audit and memo, with an unresolved question rather than an invented answer.

Hypothetical classroom case; all numbers below are authored, not facility data. A computing facility uses 100,000 kWh and 50,000 L of direct water per year. Option A costs an additional $1,000/year and saves 20,000 kWh/year, with no change to water. Option B costs an additional $500/year and saves 10,000 kWh/year, but adds 20,000 L/year of direct water consumption. Assume equal service quality, the same grid, and no other operational changes. Capital, embodied impacts and local watershed conditions are unknown. Calculate each option’s annual energy and water, cost per kWh saved and water change. Recommend an option using stated priorities, and identify missing evidence.

Exit ticket: Which part of your recommendation follows from arithmetic, and which part depends on values?

The worksheet downloads as an HTML file. Open it in a browser to work offline or print it.

Current investigation: 25 text requests/day at 390 gCO₂e/kWh. Your inputs remain unchanged until you load the reference case.

Three questions to keep asking