The SMILE Program @ OSU

As seen by our last post, students put forth a great effort during our High School Challenge. While learning about ways to recycle, the students also were able to talk to current Oregon State University students about college life. Here are some pictures from those events.  Additional photos can be seen on our Facebook page found here.

This past week the SMILE program was happy to host over 100 high school students from clubs across Oregon during the annual High School Challenge event. Students learned about bioenergy and used data to make decisions about what kind of bioenergy feedstock would be the right choice for their designated communities.  Students created posters which included infographics to defend their decisions.  Check out their work:

Food shortage is not the only issue anymore.  Wasting food is having a dramatic effect on the environment, economy and society. An estimated $162 billion is being lost because of unused food, as seen in this New York Times article.  This is an interesting topic to pose to your students. What solutions can you come up with to solve the food waste problem in your club, school, community, state, country or world? How does this solution work? Share with us!

High School SMILE teachers, we need your help!  In preparation for the April High School Challenge event, we have a survey about bioenergy in your communities.  We would like this survey to be filled out by you and your students and returned before Spring Break.  The survey and additional documentation can be found below.  You can return surveys by emailing Renee O’Neill (renee.oneill@oregonstate.edu) the data in the excel sheet, sending the hard copy originals via standard mail, or scanning in your surveys and emailing them as PDFs.  Whatever format you choose is fine, as long as we can see the data and are able interpret the results for the SMILE High School Challenge.  Please also send a copy of the complete survey your students use to help us interpret the data.

At the 2015 Winter Teacher’s Workshop, elementary teachers continued to focus on ecology. Teachers were fortunate to work with researcher and professor in the department of integrative biology, Mark Novak.  A seven lesson unit focused around streams and macroinvertebrates was shared during this session.  Novak provided an overview presentation that can help with understanding the concepts included in these lessons.

Build-a-Bug allows students work in pairs to create macroinvertebrates with adaptations that would allow them to survive in a habitat. This supplemental PowerPoint gives students the necessary background information for this lesson plan.

Home, Home, in a Stream is an activity in which students create mock streams containing the same habitats that they built their bugs for.

In the activity Macro Feeding Frenzie (along with this PowerPoint) students use various tools to collect a variety of ‘food’, which models the different feeding styles and the accompanying adaptations.

Macro Mayhem allows students to play an exciting game to help them understand how pollution impacts the biodiversity of macroinvertebrates found in a stream ecosystem.

In Biodiversity in a Leaf Pack, students create micro-habitats that will attract macroinvertebrates and place them local streams to collect organisms.

With the activity Analyzing a Leaf Pack, students collect leaf packs and analyze their findings.

Hungry, Hungry Macros allows students to use the macros collected from leaf packs and perform an experiment to determine whether shredders or grazers will eat more leaf material.

This Friday, January 30th we will be presenting bioenergy activities at our annual teacher’s workshop. This year we focused on biodegradation and are excited to share with you three different activities. First, in the Packing for the Future activity students will get to compare cornstarch and Styrofoam packing peanuts and decide which is more suitable for their shipping company. Next, in the activity Fork it Over (along with this worksheet), students will get to make their own biodegradable forks while still trying to maintain utensil strength. Last, in our bonus activity Composting–Out of Sight Out of Mind students will get to bury their newly made utensils and other utensils to compare the degradability of each product. If you are able to make it to the workshop you will see this awesome presentation from our bioenergy expert, Brian Hartman. We hope to see you Friday!

We love seeing updates and pictures from the activities SMILE has created. Forest Grove High School was nice enough to share with us the progress of their poplar trees that they received during the 2014 Winter Teacher’s Workshop. Students in this club are taking measurements every week. See for yourself their growing trees:

Last teacher workshop we previewed awesome middle school and high school bioenergy textbooks from Facing the Future.  These books are filled with activities including Sustainable Flight in the Pacific Northwest, which is a great real life example.  In this activity students will research different biofuels and decide which one is best suited to be mixed with jet fuel. They will then trace the production process and explore stakeholder’s positions with their classmates. Collectively classmates must come up with a new jet fuel policy that satisfies all of their stakeholders. This activity encourages healthy debate and will allow students to act as policy makers. We will be handing out the Facing the Future textbooks during the teacher workshop and we encourage you to check out their other amazing activities.