Class Project
Environmental Studies 126/Integrated Liberal Studies 126
Principles of Environmental Science
This course encourages you to try out new “powers” and to learn new skills in order to view energy and food on the UW-Madison campus differently than you have in the past.
What might you be curious about?
Perhaps you’d like to find out who buys what from a vending machine. Or maybe you would like to find out how trash accumulates in a building, such as towels in a bathroom or plastic bottles in a lecture hall. Or perhaps you are curious about what people choose to eat, don’t choose to eat, or throw away uneaten.
Or maybe you have questions about how food gets to our campus. How much time do people drive around in a parking lot looking for the “best” spot (and get the worst gas mileage)? Or perhaps how YOU did something out of your usual routine and what happened.
The possibilities are only limited by your imagination.
Your role in this mission is to be a person with a superpower – to see things that are invisible or hidden, to talk to people not in the present (from the past or possibly the future), or to be able to converse with parts of the natural world that normally have no voice (plants and animals).
Your objective, in carrying out this mission, is to learn something that enables you to tell a story. You also need to produce something to engage your classmates in what you learned. For example, you might produce a video, a poster or slide show, a blog, a web site (perhaps with audio links), an Op-Ed article, an oral history, or a dish to pass prepared entirely with ingredients that start with the letter P. Your choice!
The difficulties in this assignment stem from selecting a project of the right scale. Think Goldilocks. Not too big, not too small, but just right. You don’t want to do a doctoral thesis. Nor do you want to do something bordering on the trivial.
Perhaps the amount of time you need to invest will guide you in selecting the project size. We estimate 20 hours spread over several weeks.
Consult with your instructors early and often!
This assignment is worth 150 points, both on the process and on the product.
Project Schedule
All due dates are Fridays at noon.
Task / Product / Points / Due DateSuperpower Training #1
(Super-Vision) / Upload Document or Slide / 15 / February 7th by Noon
Dropbox
Superpower Training #2
(Time Travel) / Upload Document or Slide / 15 / February 21st by Noon
Dropbox
Superpower Training #3
(Nature Communication) / Upload Document or Audio / 15 / March 7th by Noon
Dropbox
Project Topic / Upload Document / 15 / March 14th by Noon
Dropbox
Project Update / Upload or hand in Document
(includes time log) / 30 / April 4th by Noon
Paper copy or Dropbox
Project Fair / Present Final Project
Upload project or some other record of what you did
(WID) / 60 / April 15th-17th In Lab
and
April 18th by noon Dropbox