Volunteers needed!

Wadi Environmental Science Centre (WESC) is looking for about 50 volunteers to participate for World Environment Day (WED) to be held on the 2nd of June at Al Azhar park. The theme for this year is "Climate change.... Why should i care?"

• The volunteers need to have a background in science and need to enjoy teaching in an out door setting as this is what they will be doing. (They will be working with students of varied ages on environmental activities throughout the day)
• Volunteers should be able to speak English and Arabic.
• Volunteers need to by dynamic
• Volunteers will need to come to an introduction and briefing to know what they will be working on scheduled for the 20th of May (to be confirmed)
• Volunteers will be required to read about the topic and study it before coming to the event.

About WESC:
WESC is a registered NGO (Non governmental organization) working with students aged 5 to 16 on out-door science and environmental education, it's a centre that has bee receiving students since 2001. Primarily working on hands on activities, were students get engaged in learning about science and their environment in an interactive fun way. www.wesc.org

If you are interested in volunteering please contact Sara el Sayed


If you are not volunteering just come and join us anyway on the 2nd of June at Al Azhar park!

Why are BC and WESC organizing WED in Egypt with a different topic and date?

World Environment Day is commemorated every year on the 5th of June. The Egyptian government will hold an official ceremony to mark this day, but the British Council and Wadi Environmental Science Centre (WESC) have decided to arrange an event for the 2nd of June. In addition, the official topic of WED 2007 is 'Melting Ice - A Hot Topic?', but in Egypt it is 'Climate Change - Why Should I Care?'. Why is this so?

While the WED in Egypt is open to the public, WESC and the British Council in Egypt are mainly targeting school students and want as many as possible to come. June is exam time and the 5th of June is on a school day. Hence, Wadi Environmental Science Centre (WESC) and British Council set the date to 2nd of June which is a Saturday so that more students and people will be able to attend.

The official topic of WED 2007 is focusing on climate changes and the effects on ice- and snowcovered areas of the world. Melting ice as an environmental problem is very alien to Egypt and its environment (though of course melting ice is a global problem and will affect Egypt's environment and people). While Wadi Environmental Science Centre (WESC) and British Council saw the need to change the topic, we did not want to stray too far from the official theme, but without the snow and the ice.

Hence, in Egypt the topic is 'Climate Change - Why Should I Care?'.

Check How Other Countries are Celebrating World Environment Day

This blog has been getting quite a bit of traffic from all over the world. It seems like a lot of people are interested in the type of event that we are organizing here in Cairo.

UNEP, on their World Environment Day 2007 website, have made a list over all the WED events taking place around the world.

If you are organizing an event, you can also register your activity there.

Make a Boat powered on Renewable Energy

Using small photovoltaic cells participants will create their own solar boats.

Global Warming Game

Using a test kit to detect carbon dioxide and understanding where there is more carbon dioxide and after doing so they will be playing a board game to understand more about global warming.

Make a Solar Cooker

Participants will experiment in building solar cookers, they will figure out the best we to attract and trap heat using passive solar energy.

Recycling Activities

These are different activities to recycle, participants will get a chance to make paper and construct their own cards, or make a toy out of recycled material or even create an aboriginal rainstick (an instrument used by the native Australians to call the rain).

Journey of Droplet Game

This game illustrates the journey of a droplet of water in nature and by so doing participants can collect beads to create their own colorful bracelet that represents their own journey of their droplet.

Composting Activity

Participants create their own mini compost in a bottle of water and can take it back home and use the compost as organic manure.

Ecological Footprint

Participants get to try and create their own farm based on two diets a vegetarian one and a meat based one and get to see which one has more ecological impact on the environment.

Polluting a Water Resource Game

Fun and interactive game that involves participants running to get their share of water, in the process they understand how water is wasted, polluted and distributed amongst the different sectors (agriculture, industry and household)

Game Mechanics

Participants will have to collect as much water as possible into their buckets in 10 seconds over 5 rounds.

Participants will be divided into four groups, with one WESC leader each.

1. The leader will have one large container with water till the brim in the centre of a large room.
2. Participants will stand one 2 meters away from the bucket making a circle.
3. Each participant will have a small container in front of them and a sponge in their hand.
4. Leader will give each participant a sponge. The largest size represents water used in agriculture, the second represents water in industry and the smallest represents water in households.
5. Leader will blow the whistle and using the sponge participants will collect as much water as they can using the sponge into their container.
6. Leader will blow whistle again and will brief about what happened.
Leader discusses that the agriculture got the most water, but also if they look at the trail on the floor the agriculture also had the most waste. Leader will discuss that households have the least water.
7. Leader will then place a drop on each sponge and tell participants to wash in their basins.
8. Participants will then take turns to empty half the water back to the main container.
9. Leader will add more water to represent rain.
10. Leader will take a sample of water labeled 1970.
11. Repeat several times until 2010.
12. Leader will compare with participants at the end the difference from one year to another.
Leader will show how pollution will increase over the years and that the water from the resource which may be the Nile is actually decreasing over the years.

What is a Greenhouse and the Greenhouse Effect?

Students will learn how greenhouses manage to retain heat, and will experiment with different media to try and figure out which will trap the most.

Background
Greenhouses are used extensively by botanists, commercial plant growers, and dedicated gardeners. Particularly in cool climates, greenhouses are useful for growing and propagating plants because they both allow sunlight to enter and prevent heat from escaping. The transparent covering of the greenhouse allows visible light to enter unhindered, where it warms the interior as it is absorbed by the material within. The transparent covering also prevents the heat from leaving by reflecting the energy back into the interior and preventing outside winds from carrying it away.

Like the greenhouse covering, our atmosphere also serves to retain heat at the surface of the earth. Much of the sun's energy reaches earth as visible light. Of the visible light that enters the atmosphere, about 30% is reflected back out into space by clouds, snow and ice-covered land, sea surfaces, and atmospheric dust. The rest is absorbed by the liquids, solids, and gases that constitute our planet. The energy absorbed is eventually reemitted, but not as visible light (only very hot objects such as the sun can emit visible light). Instead, it's emitted as longer-wavelength light called infrared radiation. This is also called "heat" radiation, because although we cannot see in infrared, we can feel its presence as heat. This is what you feel when you put your hand near the surface of a hot skillet. Certain gases in our atmosphere (known as "trace" gases because they make up only a tiny fraction of the atmosphere) can absorb this outgoing infrared radiation, in effect trapping the heat energy. This trapped heat energy makes the earth warmer than it would be without these trace gases.

The ability of certain trace gases to be relatively transparent to incoming visible light from the sun yet opaque to the energy radiated from earth is one of the best-understood processes in atmospheric science. This phenomenon has been called the "greenhouse effect" because the trace gases trap heat similar to the way that a greenhouse's transparent covering traps heat. Without our atmospheric greenhouse effect, earth's surface temperature would be far below freezing. On the other hand, an increase in atmospheric trace gases could result in increased trapped heat and rising global temperatures.

Owl Pellets and Food Webs

Owl pellets are a great educational tool to understand how food webs are made, the pellets of the owl contain a significant diversity of bones that can help in understanding the organisms that the owl feeds on and thus in turn the organisms in a given habitat.

Click on the video below to watch how the Owl Pellet experiment is done at the Wadi Environmental Science Centre.