Running head: ENVIRONMENT SEMINAR

Capstone Project Proposal:

Teaching Students to be Environmentally Conscious
Danielle Holbrook
Waxahachie Global High School

ENVIRONMENT SEMINAR

Table of Contents
Purpose 3
Benefits3
Passion.4
Inspiration4
Technical Paper Ideas..5
Audience..5
Back-up plan5
Measure of Success..6
Milestones6
Mentor..7
Engineering Design Process.7-8
Inspirational Pictures...9

ENVIRONMENT SEMINAR

Purpose
This project is designed to educate young students about how to take care of the
environment. It is important to teach children to have respect for the environment for them to be
passionate and appreciative in their future. I hope for them to achieve basic understanding of the
beauty of nature, along with how vital it is to not take advantage of their surroundings. I want to
instruct them on different things around the house and in their own environment that can be
simple and easy to do, but make a big difference.
Benefits

Allowing students to participate, visualize, and appreciate the area around them will
improve the world we live in. Teaching a generation to love the Earth and take care of it can only
positively affect the world. Waxahachie may face environmental improvements, and allow the
children to take it to their home and see what they can do.
This project will also allow me to know what career I may want to pursue in the future.
This knowledge may let me know if I want to pursue a career in with promoting environmental
issues or not. Additionally, my research will let me know if my passion matches my career
choice.

ENVIRONMENT SEMINAR

Passion
As a child, I always wanted to be a park
ranger. I grew up in the mountains of Colorado,
constantly hiking in the Rocky Mountains to a
popular trail destination called Horsetooth
Mountain. I grew up in a town that was extremely
environmentally friendly, where nearly every
aspect of life was encouraged to leave as little of an environmental impact as possible. In my
school we had entire lesson plans where we raised caterpillars to butterflies, raced snails, learned
how to compost, were given our own tree to grow, and much more. The environmental
department of Colorado State University had us go on field trips to their campus to see the
projects that they were participating in, and even took us to the Colorado River and provided us
wading boots to observe the creatures of the water. Additionally, my older sister is an
environmental engineer who graduated from SMU. She has, as I was growing up, taught me little
things around the house that I can do in order to reduce our amount of waste. All of these
childhood experiences have led me to have a strong respect and care for the Earth that I desire to
share.
I aspire to be a Civil Engineer with a double majoring in Landscape Architecture.
Landscape Architecture has a primary focus on arranging the environment in a beautiful way.
Respect for the environment and understanding is not inherently a
Texan trait. Thus, I aspire to teach these young students that we
inherited the world and we must care for it.

ENVIRONMENT SEMINAR

Technical Paper Ideas

To write my technical paper, I could do it over several topics. My primary idea is to write a
paper over global climate change, and if humans truly are impacting it. I could also write about
the destruction of the planet from humans, analyzing the impact of deforestation, the destruction
of habitats, and increasing pollution. Finally, my technical paper could be researching the best
methods and practices to teach children why the environment is so important (and how to include
this with all students different learning patterns).
Audience
I plan on creating my capstone project, in order to present
and teach young students. I will create a small class/ seminar
for elementary school students, preferably around the grade of
fourth and fifth grade. Additionally, I hope to plan something
with my mentor in order for me to attend a city event and
possibly have a booth/ demonstration to show off what I did for these kids, as well as explain
what I learned and how it went.
Back-up plan: If I do not get approval from elementary schools I will reach out to middle schools
in order to do the demonstration for sixth and seventh graders. If this fails, I will attempt to do
my demonstration for people at Waxahachie Global High School (possibly for the Biology
students) per the principal and teachers approval.

ENVIRONMENT SEMINAR

Measure of Success
In order to measure the success of the seminar, I plan on doing a pretest for the children to
answer in order to understand how much they know beforehand. Then after I go through the
planned curriculum and demonstrations, I want them to do a similar little quiz afterwards. After
all the students (hopefully about 30 students in each seminar) take the post-test, I hope to have a
50% grade increase from the pretest.
Milestones (Calendar)

Milestone

Date of Completion

Get a mentor

10-20-2016

Meet with mentor about researching

11-10-2016

Contact schools to allow me to attend

12-2-2016

Organize meeting dates with Mentor (Meet: Every other week)

1-10-2016

Design Curriculum

1-31-2017

Meet with mentor about curriculum

2-7-2017

Develop Curriculum

2-21-2017

Meet with mentor and finalize curriculum

2-24-2017

Plan out attendance days with the school

2-28-2017

Gather supplies and learning tools

3-12-2017

Do a dry run of seminar with mentor

3-14-2017

Attend School #1

(T.B.A.) Goal: 3-16-2017

Attend School #2

(T.B.A.) Goal: 3-21-2017

Attend School #3

(T.B.A.) Goal: 3-23-2017

ENVIRONMENT SEMINAR

Mentor
My mentor is John Smith. He is the Director of the
Parks and Recreation Department for the city of
Waxahachie. He graduated from Tarleton State University
with a Bachelors in Agriculture Education. After graduating
he taught vocational horticulture at WISD for 9 years, and
then moved to the Parks Department.

Engineering Design Process

Define the problem: Children need to understand and respect the environment around them, for it
is each persons responsibility to take care of the environment.
Brainstorm: My idea is to create a seminar that allows students to participate and grow in caring
for their environment, ways they can do it, and the benefit of caring for the environment.
Research: I researched different curriculum types, how to best teach children, possible visuals I
can do, and how I should demonstrate it.
Design and build prototype: Create a curriculum designed to entertain and teach younger
children about things they can do to take care of the environment. This will be done through
visuals, quizzes, demonstrations, and handouts.

ENVIRONMENT SEMINAR

Test: I will test this curriculum out on a group of my peers, as well as demonstrate it to my
mentor.
Refine: After collecting feedback from my peers and mentor, I will adjust it based on their input
(and my personal judgement). After these changes, I will finalize my curriculum and prepare to
present it.
Present findings and reflect: My intention is to get the approval of three schools, to travel to their
school and do my seminar for the fourth and fifth grade students. I will present my seminar and
demonstrations to multiple classes and may possibly have an assistant to help me execute these
seminars (volunteer from a peer). After completing each seminar I plan on writing a reflection on
how it went, and how I can possibly improve for the next seminar. When the final seminar is
done, I will be able to analyze the impact from the students, any improvements I made, and the
individuality of each seminar. This will be further analyzed in order to determine if the seminars
were a success, what my thoughts on it were, and any comments I got.
Inspirational Pictures