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!!

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!