Artiscycle Design

The Green Design Lab

admin — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 01:09:01 +0000

A curriculum developed for Solar One: Green Energy, Arts and Education Center. The Green Design Lab is a blueprint for greening your school, allowing students to understand the connections between the resources used everyday and how they impact the local environment. Focusing on the physical school building, this Guide aims to help students and faculty realize on-site projects. It provides hands-on learning opportunities that bring sustainability to life in your school. From rooftop gardens, building performance and energy efficiency, to schoolyard habitats and non-toxic cleansers – your school is the the perfect setting for addressing relevant issues that affect the sustainability of your community. The objective is to facilitate learning that allows students and faculty to think of their school building as an organism connected to the local environment.
For More Info Visit www.solar1.org

Building Performance and Energy Audit Guide

admin — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 01:07:38 +0000

A workforce development and green jobs training guide developed for Solar One, NYC’s Green Energy Arts and Education Center. The guide is meant to prepare youth ages 18-24 for a wave of emerging jobs in the fields of building performance and energy analysis. Energy auditors, technicians, engineers and mechanics are needed now more than ever to help NYC transition toward a more energy efficient urban community. This guide helps readers be apart of this movement!

For more info visit http://solar1.org/

IBM Green Innovator Activity Guide

admin — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 00:54:09 +0000

The Green InnovatorTM Activity Guide is a tool and resource, created especially for IBM volunteers, to start a dialogue with students and teachers about their local environment and emerging applications in sustainable engineering and design. This activity guide provides an introductory primer on green design and sustainability, as well as simple and low cost, hands-on activities for middle and high school classrooms and after-school settings. Activities have been selected from three main focus areas, including Design for the Environment, Sustainable Communities and Green Product Design. Each activity includes keywords, learning objectives, talking points and engineering connections to make it easy for anyone to bring sustainability to life for students in your community!
Learn More http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/

What’s On Your Plate? Curriculum

admin — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 00:49:04 +0000

The What’s On Your Plate curriculum is a companion to What’s On Your Plate? film, a witty and provocative documentary produced and directed by award-winning filmmaker Catherine Gund about kids and food politics. Filmed over the course of one year, the film follows two eleven-year-old African-American city kids as they explore their place in the food chain. Sadie and Safiyah take a close look at food systems in New York City and its surrounding areas. With the camera as their companion, the girl guides talk to each other, food activists, farmers, new friends, storekeepers, their families, and the viewer, in their quest to understand what’s on all of our plates.

Just as Sadie and Safiyah embark on a journey to discover the origins and impacts of their food, The What’s On Your Plate? curriculum invites you to learn alongside them with hands-on activities, easy to read information and investigatory projects to get your students thinking creatively and critically about what food means to their community and beyond. Presented as an adaptable resource for both teachers and non-formal educators the objective is to use systems thinking and project-based learning to spark a dialogue and relationship with your students about the interconnections of food, local ecology, health, and community. Inside you’ll find three modules exploring issues related to school food, health and access to food and local food. The curriculum also works together with the What’s On Your Plate? film providing a crucial media learning tool for cultivating discussion and a deeper understanding of the complex and hidden world of food politics through unique narratives, interviews and more.

More information go to whatsonyourplateproject.org

Feral Robotic Dogs

admin — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 19:36:36 +0000

OUT THERE, in happy family homes, in the offices of corporate executives, in toy stores through out the globe, is an army of robotic dogs. These semi-autonomous robotic creatures, though currently programmed to perform inane or entertaining tasks: begging for plastic bones; barking to the tune of national anthems; walking in circles; are actually fully motile and AWAITING FURTHER INSTRUCTIONS.

Welcome to Feral Robotic Dogs a curricula based off the work of techno eco-artist Dr. Natalie Jeremijenko. Using the widley popular robotic dog toys found in most toy stores around the country, Jeremijenko has reimagined these devices as a way to “sniff” out environmental toxins in the soil or ambient air in and around known brownfield and superfund sites by equipping these robotic devices with simple toxin sensors. In this guide, teachers and students alike will have the opportunity to make their own versions and coordinate a robotic dog launch of their own. Filled with activities and instructions, Feral Robotic Dogs is meant to inspire interactive mapping and brings the real of environmental justice into the classroom in an innovative and easy reproducible way.

Learn more

Robotic Geese

admin — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 19:20:42 +0000

Robotic Geese: Experiential Learning and Exploration demonstrates to teachers and students how to re-imagine interaction with wildlife through participatory design/build activities and field studies with natural spaces and wildlife. The following pages will show one how to build a robotic geese device, meant to bridge the divide between human-animal interaction. The idea of Robotic Geese was developed by techno eco-artist and scientist Dr. Natalie Jeremijenko through her project, Ooz, Inc. a zoo without cages. The document is divided into three parts that correspond to elementary, middle school and high school level activities all aimed at building a robotic goose device and organizing a launch to observe human, wildlife interaction supported by activities tied to exisiting science, language arts and social science standards in K-12 setting.

Each activity and goose launching is meant to foster an empathy and deeper understanding of wildlife, to facilitate imaginative interactions between animals and humans. Robotic Geese: Experiential Learning achieves this by giving students the opportunity to explore these possibilities in a playful and innovative way: by actually giving them the time and place to talk to the very wildlife they have a fascination with! The goal is therefore to structure participation and stimulate wonder by prompting questions of interaction and providing students a means to explore outside with animals in an innovative way. Lastly, the hope is that through these interactions between animals and humans, students and teachers alike will learn something new about wildlife and about themselves in a synchronistic way that re-imagines how we live and who we live amidst; animal and human alike.

The Green Innovator

admin — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 17:33:52 +0000

The Green Innovator is curriculum aimed at high school students, that explores the process of innovation through sustainable design and manufacturing. With a planet facing a myriad of environmental challenges, The Green Innovator aims to help teachers facilitate a new dialogue with students about the integral role of design and green manufacturing processes in our transition toward a more sustainable future.

This resource provides students with unique tools and strategies for thinking critically about innovative solutions to the environmental challenges that face their local communities
and the world. Filled with hands-on activities, case studies and research ideas, The Green InnovatorTM facilitates applied learning by introducing students to the concept of systems thinking; considering the relationships and connections between what we design and used every day and the impact this use has on our shared home, the earth.

Learn more at www.greeninnovator.org