My students need plant sensors to monitor plant health, tablets to track garden data, energy usage, and recycling data, and a thermal imager to monitor energy efficiency.
Ghandi once said, "The future depends on what you do today". This is the mindset that we hope to instill in the students of Polo Park. By giving them the tools to take action now, our goal is for them to see that they can make a positive impact on their own lives and the lives of others.
Our students are positive, thoughtful, and diverse.
The objective of the Green Stallion Project is to engage them at each grade level in our mission of sustainability. To do this, we will assign responsibilities that both meet the project objectives and align most closely to that grade level’s science standards. Last year our students worked very hard building an outdoor classroom, maintaining a garden, and promoting energy conservation. Because of their efforts, we were named a 2016 Green School of Quality. Unfortunately, we lacked the quantitative evidence to show that our efforts were productive, and did not reach the Green School of Excellence level that we were aiming for. Our goal for 2016-2017 is to reach more students and move up to that Green School of Excellence category. This project will place a heavy emphasis on data collection and analysis so that we can make better decisions regarding sustainability and evaluate whether or not our efforts are yielding positive results.
My Project
As in years past, 6th grade students will be responsible for collecting recycling materials. But they will now be weighing what they have collected and tracking their results in Google Forms, using one of the requested tablets. The 7th grade students will be responsible for collecting food waste, weighing it, recording their results on their tablet, and transferring the waste to the composter. The 8th graders will be responsible for maintaining the garden and tracking and recording data received from the Parrot Flower Power sensors. They will also monitor weather conditions using the RainMachine to adjust our irrigation system based on weather patterns. Finally, our STEM students will be responsible for performing school wide energy audits and using the FLIR thermal camera to identify inefficiencies in our school buildings. They will also be responsible for creating and maintaining a website that tracks energy and water usage, recycling data, and garden data.
This project will allow us to involve students at every grade level in our mission to make Polo Park a Green School of Excellence.
Too often learning is confined by the walls of our classroom. This project will give the students at our school the opportunity to move beyond the classroom and make a real and measurable impact on our campus, our community, and beyond.
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As a teacher-founded nonprofit, we're trusted by thousands of teachers and supporters across the country. This classroom request for funding was created by Mr. Smith and reviewed by the DonorsChoose team.
