Simple Power of Words

This year, I am in an Environmental Engineering class - basically a repeat of AP Environmental Science. This year I have a teacher who is definitely managing to change people's behavior and mindset about environmental issues. This teacher managed to inspire me enough to inspire my mom to make changes around the house.

1. Clothes lines to air dry clothes
2. Compost bucket in the kitchen
3. Turning off the lights when leaving a room
4. LED lighting (which I found out from this class that LED stands for Light Emitting Diode)

These are just the few simple examples that can really make an impact and I hope you can change some of your habits as well.

Since the US is no longer passing laws to accord with the Paris COP 21 carbon emitting standards, our school decided to take initiative and reduce carbon emissions to below that level on our own. Here is the link to that, check it out to see how you can take it a step further:
http://www.schoolsunder2c.org/

1990's Style Pictures

When is the last time you saw a Polaroid camera? Okay, yeah they are all over the place, but a while ago I found an actual Polaroid, made by that company from many years ago... when is the last time you saw that? I recently got film for it (which is way more expensive than the now-popular polaroid cameras), and I took a few pictures and it works! Technology has changed so much over the past 30 years, now we can just snap a thousand pictures and hope that one looks good, but at that time, you could only snap one and hope you don't over/under expose it, hope the lighting is right, hope that the film did not touch light when it was not supposed to. Wow!

Remotely (underwater) Operated Vehicle (ROV)

For an afterschool program, a few students and I are designing an underwater vehicle that will accomplish certain tasks. At first, we couldn't decide if we were going to enter the robot into a competition, or just release it in a nearby lake for fun, so we decided on both. Either way, we were invited to take a tour and get advice from the University of Washington's Applied Physics Laboratory (UW-APL), and they showed us some of their ROV's. The big yellow one in the middle is a glider which spends four hours going down and four hours going up in a V-shape, so there is no communication with it - they have lost quite a few. The smaller blue looking device on the left is similar to the one we are building, and there will be wire communication to a control panel outside of the water.
Just a side note: without pre-knowledge or reading this, it would be hard to decode the sentence: "We went to the UW-APL to get advice on our ROV". I find it funny how many terms have become shortened.