CUSD was presented with the Cornell University Partners in Sustainability Award (CUPSA) for student groups at the President’s Sustainable Campus Committee summit on November 28th. The award for student groups was given for the first time this year, along side the usual staff and student awards. Dan Roth, associate director of the Campus Sustainability Office called CUSD “one of our most successful campus clubs.”
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Today we visited Glendale Middle School in Salt Lake City, Utah to teach students about water conservation. To make the event possible, we partnered up with fellow students from University of Utah and Weber State University. To start the day off, we got the Middle School students excited and eager to learn by showing them our parody music video “I’m on a Bus.” After talking to the students about the basics of green buildings, we broke them up into small groups who each designed posters depicting different ways to make their school more water efficient. Finally, the students had the opportunity to share their ideas with each other before we said our goodbyes.
Check out the video here!
Day 5 of our bus tour began in Fort Collins, Colorado at Colorado State University. Today, our main event was a panel on sustainability, featuring professors and professionals in the sustainability field. The audience consisted of undergraduate and graduate students interested in ways to incorporate green learning in their education and career paths. Following the panel we had an informative Q&A session. Overall the event went well, and we headed out to our next destination: Utah.
Check out the video here!
Check out the video here!
Today we stopped at Kirkwood Community College in Kirkwood, Idaho!
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Kirkwood is an incredibly progressive school – their campus boasts numerous solar panels and a massive wind turbine. At our event today, we taught local high school students about the growing potential for jobs in the green industry. Students rotated between four stations and learned about wind turbine maintenance, habitat for humanity, geothermal systems in Idaho, and Kirkwood’s sustainable projects.
A special thanks to the USGBC chapter at Kirkwood for all their work in pulling this event together!
On Day 2, it was really all about the kids. With our partners from the Pennsylvania State University, we traveled to a nearby elementary school to work with two fifth grade classes. Our goal for the day was to teach kids the essential basics of sustainability while also giving them an opportunity to apply the concept in a way that was fun, exciting, and fed on their creativity.
After teaching the students about the limited nature of our world’s resources using an apple to physically demonstrated just how little resources we have access to, we showed them an array of resource reapplication examples that ranged from small, practical replacements to really creative repurposing of materials, such as transforming an airplane into a home. With these inspiring ideas churning through the minds of these two active classes, we divided them up and set them to work on two activities.
The first activity used empty plastic water bottles to create a self-watering planter that the students would use in their school garden. The next activity repurposed empty plastic water bottles for a design-build project. Each student was given paper to come up with their own design application using the water bottles and collaboratively, about 10 students decided which of the possible designs to physically build using only the water bottles, duct tape, recycled paper, and string. To provide a sense of the remarkable ideas coming from this group of 5th graders, built designs included a puppet show, complete with stage and marionettes, a toy-sized amusement park with a trebuchet, a large and functional kite, and a bird swing. Beyond these completed projects, ideas encompassed daily products, like a necklace holder or pencil case, and fiction, like a jet pack or space fighter jet. If its not evident already, these students were amazing and a true inspiration to everyone in the room. Hopefully, they will continue to apply and approach problems, sustainability related or otherwise, with this same level of ingenuity; it gives me hope for the future.
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