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!