Week 11: Reflections from the Minds of EnergyNet

The Energy Net crew needs to make some changes to the exhibit. Over the weekend, visitors took their toll on some of the exhibit pieces. 

Observation 1: Green roof pieces and rain gardens proved to be less durable than expected, crumbling to pieces over the weekend. Today the teens replaced these components with simple green foam squares. To improve access to the city mat, we lifted the mat off the floor and onto a short table. 

Observation 2: Watershed model needs a sturdier box. Over the weekend, the plexiglass piece was broken in two by small children hanging on it. We are working on getting a stronger box to put the watershed model in. 

The teens had an impromptu poetry session today documenting challenges with the exhibit. Here is a sampling of their poems. 

Destroyed

By: Anna Bowin

How could this happen in three days?

How could they demolish our city?

Everything has come to an end.

It was too happy to be true, it was too happy to last.

The city is dead!

Destroyed rain gardens.

Paradise Lost

By: E.J. Gruber

Map is clearly suffering the after effects,

Of a recent Godzilla attack on the city,

Or  more likely deliquent teenagers.

The impacts of Godzilla.....

Disaster

By: Michelle Sheppard

The city is dead,

Alone and scared,

Not covered in red,

But much is not neared.

The grass is fading day by day.
There are no trees healthy and green,

The water is not coming out to play,

The thing who did this is really mean.

Only if they had a way.

The city is on its own.

If it was made out of clay,

It would have went to the bone.

The pet has been stolen,

From the city.

It was the only thing holding

They should really take a pity.

Disaster in the watershed.

Reconstruction

By: Isaiah Spencer

As we have seen,

In the poems before,

Destroyed, Attacked, Disaster,

Such negative scores.

I am here to tell,

of a more positive tale.

Yes, Pittsburgh was destroyed.

But, there still is hope,

And people to be employed.

We can rebuild this city,

And do it really quickly,

If we have more help,

It would sure be nifty.

Pollution Solutions Exhibit Opening Today!

Today is the opening day for Energy Net's Pollution Solutions exhibit at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History! The teens will be on hand to show off their exhibit to family and friends from 1-4 pm. 

The Energy Net Crew.

The teens will walk visitors through their two activities; Water Flows and Goes and Turn the Grey to Green.

The exhibit space

Sustainable city game.

Week 10: Final Touches

Our exhibit opens this Saturday! Today the teens put some of the final touches on their exhibit activities. The 3-D watershed model now has a frame! The teens filled in the remaining topography with paper mache. The landscape all slopes downhill towards the river. All that remains is the final paint job and placing the model inside the display box.

Finishing the paper mache for the Flow and Goes activity.

We had lots of little pieces to finish for the Grey to Green activity. The teens finished making 20 water cards for each sustainable practices. The cards show the installation cost and water captured by each practice. 

Water cards for the Grey to Green activity.

It was all hands on deck to glue and paint the remaining building blocks. Visitors will place these buildings on the cityscape. The teens also spray painted the rain barrels green and made some additional green roof and rain garden pieces. We should be all set to  assemble part of the exhibit on Thursday!

Gluing and painting the building blocks. 

Constructing the green roof squares.

Week 9: The Count Down Begins

Before we all fill our bellies with turkey on Thursday, the teens put some of the finishing touches on their exhibit activities. This included painting the 3-D watershed model and painting the roads on the build a sustainable city mat. We have two more ENet days to go before the exhibit opening on December 7th! Let the countdown begin!!!!

Painting the 3-D watershed model. The green is Schenley Park

Carving out the mini rain gardens.

Building the rain garden plants with pipe cleaners.

Painting the roads on the map of Pittsburgh.

The completed Pittsburgh map! Looking good!

Wrapping up at the end of a very busy day

Week 8: Begin Construction & Design

This week each group of teens sat down and made a check list of what their group has to complete in order to better organize and assign jobs to everyone.  After the lists were made we dove into construction and design of each group's activity or model.

Here the teens are sketching out their map for the Urban Development activity.

The group making the Urban Development activity created their map by sketching the city of Pittsburgh onto some canvas and then painting it. They also created some easy to follow instructions of how to play the game as well as some fake money museum visitors will need to play the game. This group also came up with a cool slogan for their game which is, "turn the gray into green," meaning our traditional gray infrastructure needs a change toward more environmentally friendly green infrastructure.

The group responsible for the 3-D Watershed model finished constructing all of the elevation levels from foam and glued them together with cups in between to cause a bigger difference in the slope.  Once everything was glued in place they then covered the whole thing with duct tape to prepare for the final stage: covering it in plaster.

Here the teens have started covering the model with the plaster that will make the model more realistic looking.

The last group is in charge of making the main panel on the museum exhibit. This main panel will describe some of the problems the city of Pittsburgh currently has with their gray infrastructure as well as some solutions that are already being put in place around the city.  The panel will also have a map of the Four Mile Watershed so the visitors will have a better spatial understanding of where the watershed is located. And finally this panel will have some facts about our watershed and how it works.

Here we are, hard at work, designing the main panel of our exhibit. 

Week 7: 3D Watershed Models and Cities

Today the teens refined the activities they developed during Week 5. The 3D watershed model group learned how to make 3D models of hills and valleys using topographic maps.

Teens constructing simple 3D models

They traced the outline of topographic features with the same elevation onto foam sheets. They cut out each slice and stacked them all together to form a hill or a valley. They made lots of creative features!

Teen 3D topography models.

Once the teens learned how to make the simple models they transitioned to making a larger model of the Four Mile watershed. Using a topographic map they traced the outline of the area in our watershed at 800 feet above sea level onto large foam board and cut out a slice of the watershed. They did the same thing for 900 feet and 1,000 feet. We still have to complete the 1,100 and 1,200 feet slices before we can stack them all together.

Starting the large 3D model of the Four Mile watershed.

The other group worked on their sustainable city activity. They pulled together materials to start building their city. A piece of canvas will serve as the base to build their city on top of. They will draw roadways on the canvas and place cardboard buildings to represent the city. The team came up with some materials to represent sustainable stormwater management practices such as green roofs, rain gardens, and rain barrels. Painted Huggie containers will represent rain barrels and moss will be used to represent green roofs. 

Moss might represent green roofs and Huggies could be rain barrels.

Week 6: Planning out the components of the exhibit

On Thursday, we discussed what types of things we wanted to include in our exhibit.  The teens came up with ideas such as making the exhibit more interactive, but also making sure the games will not be confusing. We also looked at the exhibit from the previous Energy Net session to see how we would utilize that space and improve upon the previous teen's work.

Energy Net members discuss and plan what they want to create

A teen and Energy Net Intern measure the size of one of the tables currently in the exhibit space to ascertain how much space they have for the new components of the exhibit

The students then broke up into teams to work on the different aspects of the exhibit. The students wrote out a title for each exhibit component, what their aspect of the exhibit would be, what materials they would need, and what they wanted the museum visitors to get from their portion of the exhibit.

One group of teens are working in a group to draw out what they want to include in the exhibit.

Week 6: No ENET on Tuesday

On Tuesday, Energy Net was canceled because the teens had the day off from school. However, we were all looking forward to getting back to work on Thursday because we had some awesome ideas for designing the exhibit!

Week 5: Model Making and Halloween

Today is Halloween! A few of the teens came to Energy Net in costume! We celebrated with candy and then the team got down and dirty making models for the December exhibit.

Some of the teens dressed up for Halloween. Lyza was terrifying!

The teens came up with two main activities for the exhibit. The first activity is to make a 3D model of the Four Mile watershed. One group of teens came up with some initial ideas and materials to make a 3D landscape model with hills and valleys. They used a cardboard box, cardboard pieces, brown paper, and tape to form hills and valleys. This is a great start for the model! In the next version the teens want to use a topographic map of the watershed to make the model more realistic.

The beginnings of a 3D watershed model.

The second exhibit activity allows visitors to create a sustainable city. A city diorama with roads and buildings will cover part of the exhibit floor. Visitors will then place green roofs, rain gardens, and rain barrels inside the city and learn how much water the sustainable practices can capture. Visitors will also compare the costs of each practice to choose the most cost effective option.

The teens also played around with using water to show how green roofs and rain barrels soak up and store water. They constructed a model house (cottage cheese container) with tubes as downspouts connected to rain barrels (cups). A sponge on the roof represented a green roof.

Model of a house with a sponge green roof and cups as rain barrels.

Week 5: Model Planning

This week, the EnergyNet team dove into exhibit planning. After breaking up into groups, each team planned a "Big Idea" to relay to museum guests. The main themes include: an activity to highlight sustainable water management, a watershed model to demonstrate where the water flows, and an overall informative display as to why this is important. From now on, we are working hard to materialize these ideas.

EnergyNet Teens trying testing out a model for inspiration.

Our wonderful exhibit helper, Maryann, brought a previously used model to help the teens visualize some design ideas. The model demostrates combined-sewer overflow, a common problem in Pittsburgh, and how/if green infrastructure remediates this problem.


The video above displays one of the ideas present by the teens. Their goal is to educate the visitors about sustainable practices to slow down the water and use it productively. These techniques will capture water at the site and be used as opposed to running off into the sewer systems.

Stay tuned for the models created by the EnergyNet crew!

Week 4: Volunteering

The Energy-Net volunteer crew in Panther Hollow.

Today some of the Energy Net crew came out to volunteer for the Panther Hollow Extravaganza in Schenley Park. Our group was selected to do some hard digging. We picked up our shovels and buckets and headed down to the stream at the bottom of the valley. Our task was to dig out the sediment around one of the bridges that crosses the stream. All this sediment deposited during a rainstorm when water eroded dirt and rocks from the hill slides and deposited it in the stream.

Lyza really getting into the mud.

We removed large logs, sticks, rocks, and dirt that blocked the bridge opening. We hauled dozens of buckets full of sediment from around the bridge with just an hour and a half of work. Now water can easily flow under the bridge. With our jeans muddied up and our task complete, we headed back up to Schenley Plaza for some smiley cookies.

The Geo Squad hard at work.

Week 4: Modeling Sustainable Practices

We kicked off the afternoon by learning about the different land surfaces in the Four Mile Watershed. The teen colored in pie charts showing the proportion of different surfaces in the Four Mile watershed. We learned that 40% of the watershed is covered by trees, but 33% of the watershed is impervious surfaces. The impervious surfaces include rooftops 16%, roads 14%, and parking lots 3% of the land surface. All these impervious surfaces move water and pollution quickly into the combined sewer system.

The teens learned trees cover 40% of the watershed and impervious surfaces cover 33%.

The teens then moved to two stations. At the first station the teens learned how much water gravel, pebbles, and sand can store and how quickly water drains through these materials. We learned that gravel stores the least amount of water and water drains quickest through gravel. Sand stores the most water and water drains slowest through sand. These characteristics make sand a good material to use when creating sustainable stormwater practices.

Water storage and drainage activity using gravel, pea pebbles, and sand.

At the second station the teens used materials to recreate the sustainable practices we saw on Tuesday. Teens used sponges and felt to construct rain gardens and green roofs, plastic sheets to represent roadways, and legos to make buildings. 

Sponges demonstrate the benefits of green roofs.

After experimenting with different materials the teens presented their best ideas to the group. This video shows one group's idea to use plastic sheets as roadways and sponges to represent previous pavement. They demonstrate the benefit of the pervious pavement by dumping water on the two surfaces. Next week we will continue to develop these ideas for our museum exhibit.

Week 4: Four Mile Sustainability Tour

This week we went on a walking tour of our watershed to look for sustainable stormwater management practices, such as rain gardens and green roofs. We visited sustainable sites at the Phipps Conservatory's Living Building, the Schenley Park Visitor's Center, and on Carnegie Mellon's campus. The maps below shows the locations of the stops on our tour.



At the Phipps Conservatory we toured the green roof on top of the Center for Sustainable Landscapes. The green roof has 8 inches of soil that is planted with native plant species. The green roof provides habitat for birds and insects, captures stormwater, and saves energy by cooling the building.

The teens exploring the green roof at Phipps. 

The green roof also has 50 gallon rain barrels that capture additional water from the roof. The rain barrels store rainwater so Phipps staff can use the water in the barrels to water the plants instead of using tap water.

A 50 gallon rain barrel stores rainwater.

The stormwater lagoon at Phipps takes rainwater runoff from the roofs and filters it through a wetland. The plants use nutrients in the water to help them grow and the water provides habitat for turtles and fish. Once water from the lagoon is cleaned it is stored in large underground tanks.

Stormwater lagoon home to wetland plants and turtles!

We also saw pervious pavement which allows water to drain right through. The teens tested how well the pervious pavement works by dumping water on a section of pervious and impervious pavement. Water soaked right through the pervious pavement! See this video of our demonstration. 

We also looked at a couple of rain gardens they have at Phipps. These bowl shaped gardens capture stormwater runoff from the Phipps parking lot. Cuts in the curb allow water to flow from the parking lot into the garden. The plants then use the stormwater and purify it via filtration. 

Cuts in the curb allow rainwater runoff to enter the garden.

Group photo by the rain garden at Phipps

After our Phipps tour we headed to the Schenley Park Visitor's Center to look at another smaller rain garden and five 133 gallon rain barrels. The rain garden captures rainwater runoff from 1/3 of the building's roof and the rain barrels capture runoff from the rest of the rooftop. 

Anna for scale, showing the large size of the 133 gallon rain barrels.

This rain garden capture roof runoff from 1/3 of the roof.

Our last stop was Carnegie Mellon where we visited three more green roofs.

Posner Hall green roof has large shrubs.

Doherty Hall green roof has small succulent plants and grasses.

After our fieldtrip we came back to the museum to summarize what we learned. The teens identified the problems each practice solved and explained how each practice functions. Next class the teens will use materials to create a model to represent the different sustainable stormwater practices they saw.

Brainstorm session at the museum.

Week 3: Field Trip to Alcoa

This Thursday, the group visited Alcoa's waste water treatment system in New Kensington. There, the teens learned how Alcoa treats their waste water from the kitchens and bathrooms of their facilities. One of their environmental engineers led the tour through their Natural Engineered Wastewater Treatment system, or as they call it, NEWT. The water is first pumped to a wetland area in which air is filtered through in order to allow microbes to flourish. The microbes break down the solid waste, and use it as their own energy. The cattail plants in the wetland also utilize some of the waste as energy. The water is then filtered into a separate pond where it is treated with bauxite residue, a byproduct of Alcoa's aluminum production. The purified water is then tested, to be sure no pollutants remain.

To the right, the wetland area that aids in purifying the wastewater from Alcoa's facilities, to the left is the pond where the water is treated with bauxite

Week 3: Brainstorming Four Mile Run Watershed Problems

Teens sketched out their watershed problems.

Today kicked off with the teens reviewing information they learned so far about the Four Mile watershed. The teens reviewed how water flows through the watershed, with water draining down from the hilltops to the valleys and eventually to the Monongahela River. The watershed also contains a lot of impervious, hard surfaces such as roads and rooftops. Curbs and storm drains connect the hard surfaces to the combined sewer system. When it rains road runoff picks up pollutants and trash and transports it downstream.

A play dough model explaining how trash gets into a stream or river.

After the review, the teens formed four groups to brainstorm environmental problems in the Four Mile watersheds. Each group came up with a specific water problem and constructed a diagram or model to communicate the problem. Most of the groups focused on urban flooding or trash and pollution. One group of teens used play dough, colored paper, and toothpicks to create a model showing how trash gets into the river. The green play dough represents a forested watershed with no trash in the stream. As the stream flows through an urban area (orange play dough) trash washes into the stream. The teens suggested solving this problem by encouraging residents to recycle.

A model showing how trash and leaves can clog sewer lines.

Another group created a model explaining how trash and leaves can clog sewer lines. The teens used a piece of felt to represent a roadway and a clear plastic tube to represent a sewer pipe. To represent a clogged sewer line the teens added cotton balls and large fabric leaves to the plastic sewer tube. This clog blocks the flow of water and could cause flooding on the street.

At the end of the activity the teens presented their problems and models to the group. This activity will help the teens think about effective ways to communicate their ideas to other people. A skill that will come in handy when they are designing their exhibit.