Last year My Kid joined her elementary school’s robotics team. They spent the year trying to solve alternative energy challenges using Lego’s.
As a child, I too learned about renewable sources of alternative energy –off the back of a truck:
This week, My Kid came home with a letter from her First LEGO League coach about their mission for 2008
The Project:
1.) Research how climate affects your own community. Identify a climate problem in your area, analyze climate data about the problem, and discover what your community is doing about it. Find another community somewhere in the world with the same issue and identify any solutions they are working on. Discuss the various ways climate impacts your community and your lives. Look at climate data available for your area as it relates to your climate problem. Consider talking with experts who work with or in climate everyday, like climatologists, farmers, foresters, and community leaders. Then find another community in a different geographical area that is experiencing a similar problem.
2.) Create an innovative solution based on the information you gathered that could be used on a local or even global level to solve this climate problem or improve on an existing solution. Consider all the potential solutions to your climate problem and how great an impact you can have. Talk with experts to see what solutions are already being developed or used. Build your climate connections by creating an innovative solution to your chosen climate problem that could be applied in both communities and could be adopted by even more communities who face a similar issue.
3.) Once you have researched and developed your solution, get out there and share it! Take what you’ve learned to build awareness of the problem and promote your solution. Show your research and solution and use this project to see just how great an impact you can have on your community and your world!
That’s a lot to ask of elementary school students. And yet it is the same thing they asked of us when I was in grade school. Our teachers, and TV, told us that the adults who built the factories with smokestacks that filled the air with acid rain causing pollution, and poured the sludge into the rivers that killed the fish, and the birds that ate the fish, were ignorant. They didn’t know that would happen.
So Woodsy Owl told us kids that the clean up was our job!
This year My Kid’s multidisciplinary curriculum is based around the theme of community, both local and global. The children are taught the same thing they learned watching High School Musical; “We’re all in this together”. In the spring there will be a large art project utilizing recycled materials. The students will learn how to police the glass, paper & plastic sorting skills and light bulb choices of their parents. They will sell us canvas shopping bags covered with pictures drawn in Sharpie marker of crying trees and slogans reminding us to reduce, reuse and recycle!
“Next year I am going to save the world.” My Kid said in happy anticipation, at the school festival last spring, believing this to be what one does in the third grade.
As children, we were told that the world was ours to save.
Years later my kid is being told the SAME THING because WE FAILED!
My generation was raised in the 1970’s during the Energy Crisis, in cold houses with adults fretting about the length of our showers and the high price of oil. “Could gasoline ever really go over $1 a gallon?” was one summer’s unending conversation. Yet, many of us grew up to buy SUV’s to chauffer our own kids from mall to soccer field to McMansion in suburban housing developments without any sidewalks, miles from the nearest store.
Renewable energy missionaries were out in force when I was a kid in the ’70’s:
I rode my bike to their revival meetings. I wanted to be an actress, but there wasn’t much live theater where I lived. Desperate for role models. I fell for The New Western Energy Show hook, line and sinker. It was like meeting the real life version of my Sunshine Family dolls, made by Mattel, Inc. (NYSE: MAT)
I even had the Sunshine Family Van. I considered it one of my best Christmas presents ever! It was converted truck, with a wooden shack on top, from which the dolls apparently sold handmade pottery and leather goods at craft fairs. So you see this all seemed to me, at the time, to be an acceptable, viable, creative, even mainstream, future way of life.
But, by the time I was graduating from high school and college in the ’80’s, communal living hippie-types had turned into selfish Yuppies, and those who hadn’t were scorned. I polished my resume and wore suits in order to project a professional image. Wall Street said “Greed is good”.
Now, hipsters are getting crafty with recycled textiles, making clothes and bags to sell at flea markets and festivals, magazines and newspapers offer frugal living tips, and billboards advertise energy saving appliances.
DEJA VU!