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!!

So one of the things we enjoy while doing Clean Tech a lot is choosing a venue in a new and interesting location. Past events have been in Philidelphia, USA, Singapore, a cruise in the Caribbean, New York City, and more! As a global competition we feel that staying in one specific location is not true to the fact that we have entrants from across the globe trying to solve a global problem. And this year is no different. 

So for this reason I am excited for multiple reasons, which as long as the next few days hold true (and I have little reason to not think so), I will be back here early next week even MORE excited with a venue location and announcement and official date! We have been hesitant to release information before we knew for sure, because false promises are never a good thing, so I am happy we did wait because this will be one of the best news we have announced about our Finals location! 

So please check back then, because I want you to share in my excitement too!

One of the things that I spend a lot of time on in this job is looking for new contacts to reach out to. Even though you and I know that this is by and far the most amazing event to ever grace the earth (gotta have confidence, right?), not everyone has heard about us (gasp!) So I am always looking for new organizations, new teachers, new networks, and everything beyond, to hope that they will find this an intriguing as I, and that they will share it with all their friends who will feel the same!

One of the places I have been looking into recently is Europe as a whole. Now, here in the states, they are very open about what teachers are at the school, what they teach, and their email address to contact them at. So I had figured this would be relatively similar across the Atlantic.

But was it?

No!

I was hard pressed to even find a contact email for the general school in some cases. So I looked into it a little more and learned something that truly surprised me: not even the Ministries of Education know who the teachers at these schools are! The organization of the education system is that localized and contained! 

After exploring a but, it became more clear to me that many schools around the world do this, and it looks as if schools in the United States are fairly unique in their openness about the teaching staff. 

Crazy!

So one of the ways that we try to get the word out about the Clean Tech Competition is via Facebook ads. They are a phenomenal way to get your message to a wide audience of people across the world without breaking the bank, and you can choose the demographics you wish to target. And up until this point, they worked great!

Until the other week that is. The ad that I intended to put out was denied as being a political topic because it seems they classify it under environmental issues which is, to them, a sensitive topic. Which surprises me in several ways! I am not sure how caring for the environment is necessarily political, but regardless of that the point of the competition is to find ways to improve existing systems to make them more sustainable, which I certainly do not see as being under the umbrella of the environment! Yes, sustainability does help the environment in a lot of ways, but they are separate in the end in ways that should prevent an issue like this from happening. 

So now I am jumping through the hoops of Facebook to get in line with their system, to spread knowledge of our competition across the globe. They do have ways around it, but to me it makes no sense how these topics can be classified as being politically sensitive. 

But please do not take this as despair! It is a minor set back and I figured of all groups that could relate to my confusion, you all would be that! So, I hope you can accept one blog post that highlights a small issue during the course of the competition, because it certainly is small in the grand scheme of things. 

The moment you have all been waiting for, have had marked on your calendar for weeks, have set 15 alarms on your phone and another 7 notifications in your email, have told everyone from your mother to your teacher to your 8 month old cousin about, is finally here, registration is open!!!

Well maybe you did not quite do all of those things, but registration is still a go! If you could not tell, I am very excited to get this ball rolling and moving along! It is the first big step along the path to our 2020 Finals Event, and it is always a great feeling to make those moves happen. You have plenty of time to register, but I implore you to sign up now, because why not! You’re going to do it anyway, and as they have said for generations, the early registrant for the Clean Tech Competition gets the metaphorical worm of sustainable development! (Gonna work on that one, I promise.)

We are officially one week away from registration opening and I could not be more excited! The start is always a slow trickle (most teams wait until late in the registration period it seems to sign up?) but it is still a start! And it means we are officially underway, no turning back from here! Planning is one thing, but implementing those plans and hitting the “go-switch” that results from them is something else. It means that thousands of students across the globe will officially begin to show their interest not only in the Clean Tech Competition, but also in sustainability itself. I hope to see you join us along the way!

Hopefully by now you have received word of our theme for the 2020 Clean Tech Competition: Reducing Individual Impacts. It is a theme that all of us involved at the competition think is something that speaks deeply to all who are concerned about our environmental future. Really, the future of everything we know. I myself struggle with this daily. I want to be as sustainable as possible, use as few resources as possible, waste as little as possible. And I try, as I am sure many of you do. But I am also sure many of you struggle with finding ways daily, just as I do too. Our society has developed to a point where somehow cheap, single-use items have become easier and more convenient that something more durable and reusable. Where excessive use of anything (food, water, electricity, etc.) is more the norm than a conservative path is. So we wanted to do something about that. Wanted to try to inspire someone somewhere, really a thousand someones everywhere, to find a way to make it easier to reduce our own, personal impacts. So hopefully, someday, a billion someones can reduce their impact, to truly make that impact felt and effective. 

While we recognized that most of us wish to reduce our impacts on this planet, we also recognized there are billions of humans on this planet. Each of them, is in their own unique situation, and often this unique situation makes our impacts radically different. A rural farmer in a Bolivian village does not have the same conditions as a businesswoman in a Canadian city, and their impact is forged in a much different way. Which is why we felt it prudent to establish our categories as recognizing of this fact: Limited Resources and Abundant Resources. Having a different resource base is intrinsic in how you impact the environment. Yes that farmer may use less plastic than the businesswoman, but they certainly use more land and as their nation grows, themselves and other farmers will need more land,, which needs more water which means less drinking water for more people, and so forth and so on in a million ways. And while the businesswoman may wish to use less plastic in her life, her lunch she buys comes on a styrofoam plate, the coffee shop she visits only has plastic cups, the water bottles she buys because her water line is tainted only come in plastic and she has no way to reuse them.

These scenarios may vary widely, but there is one thing in common: they both arose because for the longest time, people did not care, did not think it mattered. But now, people do care. They do think it matters. They KNOW it matters. And for our 2020 Spellman HV Clean Tech Competition, we want to help find a way to let that caring matter. So please, send us every idea you have, because we need them all. We are incredibly excited to see what everyone has to offer, and we know every single one comes from a place of caring for the environment. 

In the end, is that not what really matters?

 

 

No, I am not talking about my breakfast (it was quick and bland.) But I am talking about Clean Tech news! Today we have our final meeting to nail down the last few details, and then we can announce it to the world! It is pretty amazing to have something like this sooooo close, but not quite there. A purgatory of excitement, one I simultaneously wish to be over now and never. Well, we know it will not be never, but until I am able to spill the beans it will feel like forever! Like having that secret you wish to tell your friend, but cannot because it will ruin the surprise, this excitement is only amplified by being unable to tell. 

 

But I promise, it will come soon!

While I do not have too much to talk about, I am just too excited to not post about the 2020 Clean Tech Competition! Everyone involved is hard at work preparing for the event, and if you are just as excited as we are, you should make sure to keep your eyes peeled for this coming month of September! We will be making an announcement of the date for our next competition final, the theme of this years event, when registration opens, and maybe another bit of exciting info as well…

Regardless, keep an eye on our social media, our blog, your email, basically anywhere you keep up to date with the newest and most exciting Clean Tech news! This will be our 9th annual competition, and we hope to see you and members of your school involved as we look for the next exciting breakthrough in sustainability and green technology!