Transcript for Project Earth Game - Connie Prewitt

“My name is Connie Prewitt, I teach 5th grade at Blix Elementary school, today I am going to teach a lesson on environmental sustainability, and the project is called, project earth.”

“Please come in and find your homestead”

“What my students are going to learn today is the impact that the choices that they make have on the environment, have on each other, how the things they decide to do today are going to impact future generations.”

“Ok are we ready folks?”
“The primary goal that you state at the beginning is that you want to leave this place better or the same as you found it. This lesson is set up to be as real life to them as possible. They have a savings account when they start out that has a certain number of beans or corn everybody wants the jobs that are going to pay the most. It becomes a “it’s all about money”

“It’s pay day again”

Student-“I love pay day, got to get that mula”

“As the game progresses it’s not so much the amount of money that they have, but how chose to spend it. What I have put together for them to experience today is a role play. Earlier we set up our homesteads, purchased our homes, our land, our cars we got our occupations, now were going to go into getting our community set up with the different options of power, garbage, water sewer and transportation. We elected our mayor earlier, so our mayor is Ingrid, can you come up on the carpet and who are our two politicians? There’s different scenarios that take different amounts of money. What type of management system are they going to have for their solid waste for water and for sewer, are they going to have a large scale community system? Or are they going to have individual wells. For transportation, are they going to have a public transportation system? Or are they going to rely only on private cars? Power options nuclear power, large scale hydroelectricity…
“Choosing between green energy, hydroelectric energy, nuclear energy or fossil fuels is going to be a hard choice for them. So go ahead and talk amongst the community, you have two minutes to decide.”
Student – “The large energy is just using water and we have a lot of water and we can’t run out of water.”
Student- “Nuclear power sometimes if there is accidents, it might pollute the water and stuff”

“I have created scenarios that mirror things that are happening in the community, things that the students could relate to. Lightning strikes a tree in the forest and burns down four houses. If the decision was made to let the previous wild fire burn, no homes are lost. Because you chose to put the last fire out this fire burned, and 4 people lost their homes. Now those 4 people have a dilemma, they need to see, do they have enough corn to replace their home? We have a situation over here, somebody has no savings left.

Student “wow this is hard.”