Journal Entry #3- Finalizing my "Guiding Question"

Since the personal project was introduced, I knew that I wanted to focus on a topic involving energy consumption. However, there were still a lot of choices to make. I specifically wanted to focus on helping people in my surrounding to improve the energy efficiency in their households whil learning more about my topic.

After I have decided to work with an "Energy Logger" as my technical instrument I decided to make final project a workshop where I teach students more about energy consumption in order to raise awareness for saving costs and improve the efficiency.

I continued by reading a handbook from the "Bundesministerium for Wirtschaft und Energie" in order to learn more about the topic:

https://www.bmwi.de/BMWi/Redaktion/PDF/M-O/nationaler-aktionsplan-energieeffizienz-nape,property=pdf,bereich=bmwi2012,sprache=de,rwb=true.pdf

Specifically the book explained how Germany tried to reduce costs  and implement environmentally friendly energy, this was part of my backround research and learning about the topic in general.

After conducting this research and combined my ideas, I finalized my question to:

How can I raise awareness about energy consumption and enable students to improve the energy efficiency of their households in one week?

Journal Entry #2- Choosing my Mentor

A big part of the personal project is to chose a mentor who will help and guide the student throughout the entire project.

At the beginning I was planning to chose an english teacher to help me. I though that it might be useful if someone could help me organizing my project, whilst helping me with the format of my final essay.

However, after thinking this through again, I figured it would be more useful to have a teacher who is involved with this project and knows a lot about my topic, energy consumption. In my opinion it is very useful to have a teacher who knows a lot about my topic and who can help me organize my thoughts. I decided to chose a science teacher to help me.

I had my first meeting last week, i am very glad to have chosen a science teacher, since I have the feeling he understands my topic well and knows what I am going for.

Journal Entry #1 - Brainstorming Ideas

In the last couple of months I have been reading a lot in the news about sustainability. For us nowadays it becomes more and more important to make sure to keep the energy efficiency low in order to save costs, but also reduce the carbon footprint.

I thought about focussing on costs and reducing the carbon footprint for my project. I want to explore both these issues, in order to raise awareness for the topic and make it easier for people to improve their households. I have chosen an instrument called: "Energy Logger 3500", with which each student will measure their energy efficiency at home.  I have planned to make a list with around 5 things that each student measures for a fixed tim ein their household.

Through this I do not only learn a lot about the topic myself, but also make it easier for the students around me to participate. It is our responsibility to take care of our environment and by saving energy less energy sources, like oil or coal, would be used up causing a more sustainable environment. Perhaps I also want to link my project to renewable sources of energy and investigate these points. However, I am still unsure.

Introduction to Project

Hello and welcome to this Blog! In the following months I am going to study energy efficiency. Over the last couple of years, energy has become a more and more important issue. Energy costs are rising rapidly, and traditional energy sources, like oil or coal, are vanishing. Global warming is becoming more and more real and consumption as well as the production of greenhouse gases are continuing to increase.
I decided to choose this as the topic of my project, since I want to learn about and create awareness about this worldwide issue. I am planning to conduct two workshops with students in my grade. In the first workshop I will explain the issue and introduce the instrument with which the students will measure the energy consumption in their households. Then, after evaluating the data which was collected, I will conduct a follow-up workshop. In this workshop I will talk about the results, and give useful advice for improving efficiency, regarding how best to minimize costs and reduce one's carbons footprint. This project will take place over several months and will be documented here.