Developing a Program for Measuring Ecological Footprint on the Base of Middle School Students' Consumption Lifestyle

중학생의 소비생활양식 조사를 통한 생태 발자국 측정 프로그램 개발

The purpose of this study was to analyze middle school students' consumption lifestyle and develop a program for measuring Ecological Footprint (EF) for them. For this study, 200 male and female middle school students in large cities, medium & small cities were selected to analyze their consumption lifestyle. It was also that the existing programs for measuring EF were studied and basic rules of setting up new EF indicators were established based on the results of survey and literature study. 15 indexes was selected by dividing the life areas into food, housing, traffic, goods and services areas and than the delpi computer programming tools was used to develop program for measuring EF in this study. The program for measuring EF can be used as educational materials for consumers' environment education in the areas of social environment education and school environment education. The followings are suggestions coming out of this study. First, it is required to revise and complement program for measuring EF analyzing the problems that occur when applying it to middle school students actually. Second, some data that used during normalization of EF ate originally from the USA. So it is necessary to change the data to meet the Korean situation. Third, it is necessary to have design work that can invite interests of students with consumers' environmental education materials through cooperation between environmental education experts and computer programmers. Fourth, it is necessary to have practical research with consumers' environmental education adding educational contents into EF measurement program. Fifth, it is necessary to develop a method for distribution an expansion of the program for measuring EF to make it usable in different types of environmental education materials.