GREEN TEAM
Mr. Amundson and Mrs. Meyer
Introduction
Ozone Park is an urban neighborhood in the largest city in the world, New York. Large urban neighborhoods have many problems that need to be solved. One of those problems is the lack of sustainability at PS63 Q. Can we make the neighborhoods within the city efficient enough that they can sustain their populations safely and affordably?
Schools often act as large community centers for urban neighborhoods. At the school level, can we make changes that would make the school more sustainable and by example lead the way for the rest of the community?
PS 63 is a large school, educating ~1100 students and having ~200 staff members. What can we do to reduce waste, increase efficiency, reduce the carbon footprint, give back to the community and create spaces that would encourage and facilitate sustainability initiatives in the school and community?
Here is some information about what it means to be sustainable:
Sustainability (Required video)
Sustainable Schools Around the World
Task
Your task is to act as green engineers. You will investigate PS 63 and identify areas where the school can improve its sustainability initiatives. After identifying these areas, you will devise plans to improve upon these areas/practices.
1. First, create an animation using scratch.mit.edu or a brief video using iMovie that explains what sustainability is and why it’s important to a school community. This will be shared with your survey that you create in the next step.
2. Your second task will be to create a survey of the school community that will help you to identify areas in which the school can improve upon its sustainability.
a. Link to created survey: https://forms.gle/1SHNQC9VF7ie3gew9
3. Next, you will create a Google Slides presentation highlighting the areas that you discovered or investigated due to survey responses with pictures and descriptions of what you see. Include some ideas on how you could improve upon the current practices in your slides.
4. Create a website using sites.google.com that showcases your investigative work and your plans on how to improve the school’s sustainability. The website will be created on a template that is organized according to the Public Policy Analysis model. Also, use this link as a guide to understanding the PPA. Please make a copy of the template before editing.
Process
Part 1
1. Create your Scratch animation/interactive presentation that explains what accessibility is and why it is important to places like schools in urban communities.
a. Use this template to begin your project. Please remix.
i. Create a conversation between two characters that answers the questions in the next section.
b. Address the following ideas in your animation or interactive presentation:
i. What is sustainability?
ii. What are some ways that we can help to make our communities, schools and homes more sustainable?
iii. Why is sustainability important to our communities?
Part 2
1. Create a Google Form with questions that survey people about the sustainability of PS63. The form should have questions that address a wide range of topics in regards to sustainability such as waste removal, recycling, water usage, cleanliness, energy usage, material consumption, food waste to name a few.
Part 3
1. After you create the google form and analyze the responses, have a meeting where you discuss the responses as a team. Make a plan to investigate some of the areas that the school community has highlighted as areas of concern.
2. Record what you see with notes and pictures put into the google slide template. This will become the guideline for the work you want to do. You can add your own ideas to this too, but it is important to have the community's issues addressed also.
a. Sample of student work: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1Mshm8bof7W8JitTUwtMCkbVBHdjBKKysmiaAo5JFTgc/edit?usp=sharing
Part 4
1. Use this website (make a copy please) to outline your steps to improve sustainability at PS63. Each webpage of the website should relate to one step of the PPA process. The pages are already labeled. You just have to enter the information, ideas and solutions that you’ve come up with to have a plan that improves sustainability at PS 63. You can use pictures, text, links to other websites, on any of the pages.
a. Sample of student work in progress: https://sites.google.com/schools.nyc.gov/sustainability-ppa-template/gather-the-evidence
Resources
Sustainable Schools Around the World
Evaluation
Students will use Google Form checklists to self-monitor for completion of each section of the project.
Form for Scratch Animations: https://forms.gle/Hj2HTZP6XDBwj3Qb6
Conclusion
The goal of this projects was for you to become better acquainted with the processes and policies in place at your school so that you could help to change the policy to make for a more sustainable urban school. By exploring the concepts of sustainability, you gained knowledge on what it means to be sustainable. Then through exploration, questioning and analysis you came up with ideas that could improve on the present state of your school and make for a more sustainable future. We hope that you enjoyed this topic and the process of enacting change in your community. Along the way you even learned a few new tech skills that can be applied later to other projects.
Standards
Draw on information from multiple print or digital sources, demonstrating the ability to locate an answer to a question quickly or to solve a problem efficiently.
Integrate information from several texts on the same topic in order to write or speak about the subject knowledgeably.
Write informative/explanatory texts to examine a topic and convey ideas and information clearly.
With some guidance and support from adults, use technology, including the Internet, to produce and publish writing as well as to interact and collaborate with others; demonstrate sufficient command of keyboarding skills to type a minimum of two pages in a single sitting.
Conduct short research projects that use several sources to build knowledge through investigation of different aspects of a topic.