The Campbell Reporter

Cover Story

Photograph by Jacqueline Ramseyer

It's Getting Hotter: Karen Motreja (left) and Ian James check the greenhouse temperature in their science project at Casa di Mir Montessori School. The school had an all-day symposium on the effects of global warming.

Bright Idea

Casa di Mir science fair tackles climates

By Alicia Upano

Saving the earth might be a lofty goal for 6- to 12-year-olds, but someone's got to do it.

Instead of the traditional school science fair, Casa di Mir Montessori School in Campbell tackled climate change and sustainability in an all-day symposium on Feb. 15.

At the symposium's first workshop of the day, students participated and led workshops on global warming, and shared the results of their research on environmental topics ranging from the rise in sea level in the south Florida Everglades to solar-powered cars.

The students even extended a special invitation to former vice president Al Gore, whose documentary An Inconvenient Truth inspired the school event. Gore did not attend, but speakers did include Youth for Environmental Sanity founder Ocean Robbins, environmental advocate Rob Caughlan, and Chris Potter, a senior research scientist in the ecosystem science and technology branch at NASA Ames Research Center.

Like An Inconvenient Truth, much of the day involved the discussion of global warming and its subsequent effects on the environment. Global warming is the gradual heating of the earth, which scientists say is caused by greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide.

Parent Mary Welty-Dapkus played the Global Warming board game with her daughter, Emma. She said global warming is responsible for the decline of polar bears and ice caps, such as the disappearing snow on Mt. Kilimanjaro.

While companies in the private sector are addressing the changes in the Earth's climate, little is being done to educate tomorrow's citizens and scientists, said Wanda Whitehead, school executive director of Casa di Mir Montessori. The school has been planning the February symposium since last summer, when a teacher recommended the event.

Students have studied global warming, and have incorporated their knowledge into their home environment. For weeks before the symposium, families checked their gas and electric meters to gauge their energy intake and took measures to decrease their carbon dioxide output.

Kendall MacDonald, 8, said she turned the lights off whenever she left a room, and opened windows in the morning to let the sun's rays bring heat naturally into their home. Her mother, Lia, also turned down the heater's thermostat to save energy. Some families also monitored their appliances and air-dried their laundry.

Together, the Casa di Mir community dropped their gas usage by 33 percent and their electric consumption by 27 percent in a two-week period. The drop in energy use correlates to more than 10,000 pounds of carbon dioxide.

"That's a lot of carbon dioxide that we didn't put out into the atmosphere," teacher Liz Muir told the students. "It's because of everything you and your family have done, so I think we're making a difference."

Families who participated in the home survey also said the changes were easy and fun, Muir said. It got some students to thinking about how to decrease energy use in the school, such as using fewer lights in the Campbell school's main room.

"We could do this in two weeks, and we didn't particularly have to suffer. We just made different choices," Whitehead said. "Could we make the changes last? Could we find ways to do better? Are you up for it?"

Whitehead plans to retain the environmental science learning element in the school's future science fairs, as well as blending the knowledge into the school's existing curriculum.

"We want to work a lot of those things into our practical life studies, so they become the thinking behind the habits of the future," Whitehead said.

This ability to create change is what makes climate control such a wonderful study for students, said James Callahan, founder of climatechangeeducation.org.

Whitehead found Callahan while looking for symposium presenters, and discovered there were few organizations educating students on climate change.

Callahan, who has been a volunteer docent at area science centers for seven years, said there has been no bigger subject than climate control in the scientific world for the past decade. Scientific research on climate change is well-funded and extensively researched, but has often been colored by politics, Callahan said.

Callahan's work tries to bridge the gap between science and public knowledge. His volunteer organization hosts a hands-on global warming demonstration, where students role-play as space scientists who design space ships that traverse the solar system.

A packed room at Casa di Mir watched the science demonstration. In the span of 20 minutes, students and parents discovered first-hand what took NASA years to realize. Carbon dioxide, a "giggly wiggly molecule," was affecting planet temperatures.

"It wasn't just the kids hanging out," Whitehead said. "It brought up some wonderful realizations and questions."

For Callahan, however, Casa di Mir is breaking new ground. "What we see in Campbell is really a leading school that schools all over California will be learning from," Callahan says. "It can be very scary, but it's also a subject where people can really make a difference. To know about it, it really gives people a bit of hope."

For more information on Casa di Mir, visit www.casadimir.org. Climate change information is available at climatechangeeducation.org and globalwarmingcalifornia.net. Residents may measure their carbon dioxide emissions at acterra.org.