Potter students collaborate with Turkish school

FALLBROOK – James E. Potter Junior High students, administrators, and a parent joined together on Jan. 3 for a Skype video conference with TED Koleji School in Istanbul, Turkey. The students are part of Brad Fox’s seventh grade life science class, who are performing a collaborative carbon footprint project with the Turkish school.

The purpose of the project is to raise student awareness about differences and similarities of international cultures, and challenges in global ecology. The project was posted on the GobalSchoolNet.org website by Fox in the fall of 2010 and two schools responded: the TED Koleji School in Turkey, and the Lincoln School in Heredia, Costa Rica. Students in all three schools are visiting five carbon footprint websites on the Web and calculating their personal earth scores.

On each website, a student inputs personal information about their dietary habits, the construction and energy usage of their home, the nature of their daily transportation, and other resource-use behaviors. A typical score for an American student might be 4.5, which means that if every person on the earth lived like this student, the equivalent of 4.5 earths would be needed to sustain that lifestyle.

During the videoconference with the Turkish school, Potter and TED Koleji students first exchanged the average scores for all classes visiting each website. American students were surprised that the Turkish students were able to record scores of 1.5 and 1.7 on two of the websites. Apparently, students in Turkey are better able to adjust their daily lifestyle to a more reasonable use of earth resources than their American peers.

Potter students were somewhat dismayed to learn that the websites actually build in a high score bias for first-world nations because of their high energy use and complex, resource-intensive infrastructure. Nonetheless, these same students have come to realize that because Americans use a disproportionate amount of the earth’s resources, that any reduction in resource use will have beneficial effects for all countries.

The Turkish students suggested that they might raise awareness of earth resource issues by having an “earth day” activity on their campus where problems and solutions could be addressed. Science students in Mr. Fox’s class have come to realize that even slight changes in their diet, transportation or home energy use can yield important benefits for resource management.

The cultural exchange between the two schools was also quite interesting. One Potter student asked whether Turkish students might be learning to belly dance, as might be expected in an Arabic culture. One of the Koleji students replied that in fact, they were working on a pirate dance production, and also liked to do “hip-hop” dancing!

When asked about elective classes and school activities, the Turkish students offered that many of them were learning French and German languages, as well as their native language and English. The Turkish school has a well developed club system on campus which includes football, basketball, soccer, judo, and cooking, to name a few.

A video conference with the Costa Rican school is pending. The reader is invited to visit some of the same websites that are being used in the Carbon Footprint project:

http://www.myfootprint.org/en/visitor_information/­

http://www.footprintnetwork.org/gfn_sub.php?content=calculator

http://footprint.wwf.org.uk/