I am working on my senior project essay, and I will be finishing the second draft this weekend
Over break and this past week I have gotten a lot done on my project. The main accomplishment is that I did my outline, which was very detailed and was 2-3 pages typed. I am very happy about this, since it now makes writing my paper much easier, since I have everything I am going to write, already written down. All i have to do is finish the research for the last portion of my project, which will compose of one phone call or email to my outside consultant, and then i have to write my rough draft, which is basically just the information down, not necessarily grammatically correct, since its only the first of the three drafts.
This week I did a number of things for my senior project. I met with Mr. Schade and fixed my rubric to fit my product, and also helped me to clarify my product. Doing this helped me get a better thought of what my product is, and now I can work more effectively on my project. I did calculations of how much rain that would be collected from the roof of the senior building throughout the whole year, because I am wondering how much water i would be able to collect if i collected it all throughout the winter as well. The drinking fountain portion is also a little bit changed. Since the water fountains are not directly connected, I would have to install three of these fountains in the senior building, which would only cost $900 without installation. For the toilets, that would be the hardest part to convince people to do, because it is expensive. It saves a LOT of water, but it costs $300 per bathroom. If all parts of my plan were done, the money saved from the water coolers plan, could be used to pay off the toilets overtime, and actually save the school money overall. I will meet with my outside consultant next week, to finalize things before starting to write my paper.
Last week I was finding out how much water could be saved from collecting rain, and i realized something. The fields aren't watered in the winter, or early spring and late fall. Water could be collected throughout the inactive months, and saved for when the fields actually need it. So my original figure of 15% of the amount of water needed for one week, will now be much more, because I will have all of the water from the previous months, when it was not needed. I am also starting the other two parts of my project, the toilets and water fountains, at the same time. I am waiting from the response from Harry Courter, and then I will begin. I also have to fix my rubric, since I didn't really understand what it was that I had to do.
This week I have been working to figure out how much water Ross uses, or how much water it takes to keep Ross running. Using lots of math, i figured out how much water it takes to maintain the sports fields, which was a lot more that i thought. The two regulation size soccer fields take 6,560 cubic feet of water per week!! I also found out, that just in the month of November, 251 cubic feet of water could be saved to water the fields, and if we collected water from four buildings the same size as the senior building (CWB, High school building, Media building, and Senior Building) over 1,000 cubic feet of rain could be gathered in one month! Since the fields are mainly watered in the hot months, late spring and summer, I believe if that we collected the rain from fall, winter, spring, and summer, we would have enough water to water the fields using only the collected rain water. I will figure this out in the next couple days and update on my next blog entry. I also completed my rubric, which was a bit confusing at first, but I managed to do a pretty good job on outlining my potential product.
