Are you someone who procrastinates? Started research recently? Totally forgot about this Competition to begin with? Well the good news is you still have time to register! The registration period ends on April 10, and papers are now due on April 12, so you still have time to get your work done and papers submitted!

In case you missed our original post, we had extended registration to accommodate teams met at the National Science Teaching Association conference in Boston! However due to global conditions I am sure you have all heard of more than you care, the conference was cancelled. While saddened by this, we fully support this decision by the NSTA to help keep everyone as safe as possible. 

However this works out for anyone who has not yet entered! So practice your best social distancing skills, wrap up that research, finalize that paper, and finish your registration in the Clean Tech Competition! 

My how time flies when you are busy! It seems like just yesterday it was the first day of a new year, and here we are just days away from the start of the third month! March Madness may be a term used in college basketball (at least here in the States) but here at the Competition, it certainly also applies to us. 

March puts us in the final stretch for registration and Competition awareness, so we are hustling and bustling to get the word out to as many people as we can! You may have received an email or seen our posts on Facebook (hopefully the promoted ones too!) and I hope you have registered your team and sent it on to a friend (or three!)

With over a month to go for registrations, the Competition has just crossed into the 21 country tally! Recent additions include India, the UAE, Khazakstan, Kenya, Nigeria and Brazil! With teams from Brazil hopping on, we now have entrants from every continent on earth, and we are showing no signs of stopping. We have said this more times than we can count, but we are a global competition for a global problem. The issue of a sustainable future affects all of us, no matter what country, continent, community or culture that we are a part of. This is why we have chosen Reducing Individual Impacts as our theme for the year, because we want the impact to be felt on a personal level for everyone!

 

If you are reading this, then odds are you care a great deal about the environment and understand the gravity of the situation we are currently in. It is a fight for the life of everything we know. To you and I, that is a very big deal. We understand why this is an issue, and how it became an issue, and what we have to do to try to prevent it. But a lot of people do not, far more than is really imaginable and it hard to understand why. 

The conclusion I have come to, and have read many an article or opinion piece that has similar ideas, is that it is not so much that these people do not care, but that they do not know how to care. And I do not mean that in a “they have no emotions way” but in a they do not fully understand how it works way, and do not care to learn more. Often these are intelligent people. They are not unable to grasp the concept, they just have learned what they have learned, and decided that they know enough about it, and chose to claim they have read all that matters on the subject and that the rest is just not true or an exaggeration. 

This is why, when confronted someone who does not share the same ideals as yourself on this (or any) subject, it is important not to get angry and lash out, because that only puts people on the defensive and less likely to listen. Asking them to explain how they came to their conclusion and then gently pointing out inconsistencies and misconceptions works much better. Attacking the whole basis of someones ideas, especially someone who is able to understand the full picture as long as they have the full information, is a surefire way to make them not wish to listen to you at all. And then you have truly lost. 

Well, that got more philosophical than I expected, but I hope you see the point! It is hard not to get upset about something you feel so very passionate about. But if you are to help someone see the error in their way, you have to talk with them, not just at them. 

Those of you keeping up with the Clean Tech Competition social media recently know that I recently spent some time in England attending the Association for Science Education’s Annual Conference! The Association for Science Education (ASE) is the professional network for the United Kingdoms science educators, and last week over 2,500 of their members (and many from outside the UK) met at the University of Reading for several days of networking and professional development. I was lucky enough to attend and I am glad that I did! 

Each day was packed with lectures and demonstrations, so many so that it was extremely hard to chose which ones to attend! I saw more talks on research programs in high schools than I can even calculate, and it was a great place to introduce the competition to a wider audience than previously possible. Everyone I spoke with was enthusiastic about the Competition, and promised to pass on the information to either their students or colleagues. 

The atmosphere was incredibly inviting and inspiring to anyone with a remote interest in science. A lot of the sessions focused on how to integrate an understanding of sustainability and environmental appreciation, which was a wonderful thing to see since that is obviously the focus of the Clean Tech Competition!

If any of you ever get the chance to attend, then I highly encourage it! We will certainly be back next year, maybe to give a presentation or two on how teachers can integrate CTC into their curriculum, and bring environmental enthusiasm to their classroom and beyond. 

Running a global competition means meeting an international audience, which can sometimes be more difficult than you would expect while sitting at a desk, even in a highly connected world such as ours. So every so often, we travel outside of our New York base to meet new friends! This time, I am visiting the Association for Science Education Annual Conference in Reading, England!

Today is the second day of the event, and while I had hoped to write for you all yesterday to preempt the event, I simply did not find the time between flying across the Atlantic and rushing about this way and that to find my hotel, find the venue and, most importantly, finding new friends! 

Yesterdays event focused on an international audience, while today includes almost 2,500 of the United Kingdoms most intriguing and excited science teachers, researchers, instructors and specialists, all coming together to talk about their mutual love for science and the various techniques used to inspire and intrigue the next generation of innovators!

I will be posting updates when I can on our Facebook page, so keep an eye on that for pictures, inspiring quotes, and anything else I determine to be interesting enough to share! Though, to be honest, I feel as if everything here is inspiring enough to share with you all, but sadly I do not think live streaming the entire thing would be the best tactic! 

In any case, your Administrator is abroad and searching to make new friends to help our once small Competition grow even larger than ever before! It is only through a group effort that we will solve our sustainability issues, and I can think of no place better right now than to be here!

Happy 2020 everyone! 2019 was a momentous one for the Competition, as we saw our most widespread year yet and met at an extremely prestigious and welcoming university! For me, it was a year of a lot of firsts as I waded through many personal challenges to make this event happen, and to be honest, I am very proud of myself and what I was able to accomplish professionally. Every day should be spent trying to better and improve yourself and what you can handle, and I hope you all tried as hard (and hopefully harder!) than I did this last year for myself.

 

It is so incredibly exciting the have finally reached the year itself that we hold our next competition! Even though we still have 7 months until the Finals event, that time is going to fly by faster than you would imagine. There is still plenty of time to work on your projects and papers, but that time is going quick. Registration ends on March 13th and papers are due on the 3rd of April, so do not delay too long!

In the course of administering the Competition, I have had to do many things that I never had before. This is always a great part about a new place of employment, none of them are exactly the same, allowing you to grow and learn as you progress through life. Some of these are things you can apply in every day life, while others are job specific. 

A couple weeks ago, I had the exciting opportunity to participate in something that will help me in both: I was interviewed by Ben Newsome over at Fizzics Education for their podcast! Fizzics Education is a phenomenal organization that is based in Australia, where they do all sorts of science education, parties, demonstrations and more! Check out their website for more if you are in their neck of the woods!

I had reached out to them a while back to see if they could help me share news of the competition, and Ben got back to me with an enthusiastic yes, but that he also wanted to interview me! While public speaking is not new to me, doing it on record in a way that would last forever, that was different! 

In either case, check out the interview here!

 

Exciting non-competition-but-still-related-news for once! If you have been an active viewer of our website and social media, you have certainly noticed that in the last couple days several of the images have begun to look much more…polished, like the one below that is also on our home page. That is because one of the new employees here at the Center for Science Teaching and Learning is extremely well versed in all things Photoshop, and has been creating new and fancier looking images than we previously had! Now, you may be asking, “How did you make those images before?” Well, the answer is still Photoshop, but created in such a level that a word processor would have sufficed. And now, they are made with actual, real Photoshop skills that weren’t learned from 10 overly detailed (yet still confusing) YouTube videos! 

I am very excited for this, if you could not tell.

Mark your calendars folks, because we are officially going to Washington, D.C. on July 2nd for the 2020 Clean Tech Finals! We have been working away on this one for quite some time and are so pleased to be able to officially announce this! There are several reasons we are excited, so please read on to find out why!

The first reason is the venue itself. We will be hosting this at the brand new Hilton Washington DC National Mall. This beautiful new 4-star hotel has a gorgeous chandelier entrance, connects directly to the metro for transportation ease, has multiple eating options and so much more! And we have secured a rate for our Finalists that is far below the average rate for the time of year that we will be in the area for, making this as affordable as possible for everyone. 

Next up on this list is the other event that will be occurring at the same time as our: the U.S. Department of Energy Solar Decathlon will be held at the same time as our event, and they are just as us that our events will be happening simultaneously. The Solar Decathlon is a collegiate competition that challenges teams to construct highly efficient buildings powered by renewables, and for the Finals each of these homes will be set up and fully functional for the public to see. This event will be on the National Mall strip itself, which leads to the next exciting point…

The hotel is just over a half mile from the National Mall itself! Not only that, but the Smithsonian and the International Spy Museum are within that half mile too! And that does not even begin to include all the other historical and governmental buildings the US capital has to offer! As a lover of history and politics myself, I am most excited for all this!

Speaking of history, as some of you may have realized (hopefully all those from the US did!) the finals are 2 days before the anniversary of American independence, July 4th! The celebrations that occur for this momentous occasion in US history are incredible, and hopefully many of our Finalists will be able to stick around and catch some of these once-in-a-lifetime events. 

Finally, the Smithsonian Folklife Festival will be occurring at the same period as well. While not directly related to our  main goal of science and renewables, it is a massive festival with attendance of over 450,000 people, which means even more people in the area to stop by and see what amazing projects we will have on display!

So, there you have it, all the many reasons this Finals location is so exciting! We will have more information for you in the future, but I can only hope you are even close to as excited as I am!!