Thursday, May 21, 2015

Science partners with museum on Ocean Bound! exhibit

By Ziwei Chen, Science Communications. This is the latest in a series of #UWCommunity stories that feature Waterloo in the community.

This past winter, the Faculty of Science teamed up with the Waterloo Region Museum to create two displays for the new Ocean Bound! exhibit. This collaboration, formed with Waterloo’s Earth Sciences Museum and the Students of the Water Institute Graduate Section (SWIGS), aimed to educate the public about ocean watersheds, aquatic animals and ecosystems.

“The exhibit focuses on the oceans but it shows the impact of how our day-to-day routines affect water both locally and globally in our aquatic ecosystems,” says Earth Science Museum Curator Corina McDonald.

One display, reminiscent of a giant pop bottle machine, is made up of 200 recycled plastic bottles and shows how many litres of water the average person uses in a single day. This interactive display lights up with the touch of a finger and shows water usage through an engaging and hands-on approach.

Despite increases in the area’s population, Waterloo Region water usage per person has declined dramatically over the last two decades from 400 litres to 195 litres per person. The decrease is a testament to how well the community is working to conserve water.

However, there is still the large issue of the several thousand plastic water bottles that are used daily. In fact, 500,000 bottles are collected from residences in Waterloo Region each day.

To show the impact in an artistic way, SWIGS collected over 5000 plastic bottles and repurposed them into sculptures of ocean creatures.

The larger-than-life sculptures resembled a sea turtle, a jellyfish, an octopus and a stingray. Named the ‘creatures of the gyre’, these animals inhabit ocean gyres, regions of the oceans surrounded by large rotating ocean currents.

“Every year, more and more human-made garbage makes its way to our oceans,” says former SWIGS Outreach Chair and Earth and Environmental Sciences alumna Cailin Hillier, MSc ‘14. “It is estimated that plastic in the oceans contributes to the death of over 100,000 marine mammals and one million seabirds each year.”

Based on recycled bottle statistics, it takes 20 minutes for the region to produce the number of bottles used in the sculptures.

“It’s great that our department and graduate students are contributing to the local museums,” says McDonald.

The Ocean Bound! exhibit ran from January 30 to May 10. The exhibition was created by the Sciencenter of Ithaca, New York, with funding from NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

The pop bottle display will be at the Waterloo Wellington Children’s Groundwater Festival next week from May 25-29. The display was first created during the inaugural year of the festival and will return this year to show the difference in water usage between now and 20 years ago.

Did you know May is museum month? Take a break from your day and visit the University of Waterloo’s Earth Science Museum as well as our Optometry & Vision Science Museum.

Update on new student transition changes for 2015

A message from the Student Success Office.

As the next group of Waterloo students are confirming offers of admission, the Student Success Office has been working closely with faculties and campus partners to ensure programming is in place to help these students make a successful transition to university.

In March of this year, the Student Success Office provided the campus community with an update about changes to Student Life 101 and other new student transition programs. These updated faculty-specific and audience-specific student transition programs are an example of the collaborative model that is needed to ensure students receive the targeted support they need.

New student transition programs for summer 2015 include:

• Applied Health Sciences will host AHS 101 on Saturday, July 11. This one-day event will invite AHS students to campus to take part in community-building, meet their academic advisor and get hands-on help with course selection.
• Arts is focusing on building a unique and engaging online presence (Arts 101) to support Arts students during their transition.
• Engineering will host Engineering 101 on Saturday, July 11. This one-day event will invite Engineering students to campus to attend their first Engineering lecture and tutorial and get a head start on preparing for co-op, including starting their first co-op resume.
• Environment will host Environment 101 on Saturday, July 11. This one-day event will invite Environment students to campus to take part in community-building and learn more about what it means to be a successful Environment student.
• Math is focusing on updating their online presence for new Math students as well as International Orientation programming because a large percentage of Math students are more likely to benefit from content presented online or at International Orientation.
• Science will host Science 101 on Wednesday, July 15. This one-day event will invite Science students to campus to take part in community-building, sit in on their first Science lecture and learn where they can access Science-specific academic support.
• A transfer student event will be hosted on Saturday, June 20. This afternoon event will provide transfer students with the support and resources they need to start at Waterloo, including how to navigate our systems like Quest, Portal and Learn.
• International Orientation will run the weekend before Orientation (Sept 4-6) and is open to any student who identifies as international, whether they have a study permit, attended high school internationally, are new to Canadian culture, or are developing their English language skills.
• Orientation will run Sept. 6-12 and programs are available for first-year students, transfer students, exchange/study abroad students and graduate students.
• Online resources: the Orientation website will be a great resource for students, staff and faculty over the summer as a first-year video series, and faculty and audience-specific content and schedules are added.

Each of these initiatives will benefit from staff and faculty engagement and as everyone on campus plays an important role in supporting student transition, we look forward to sharing these opportunities with the campus community over the summer.

Any questions about the changes to new student transition can be directed to Heather Westmorland in the Student Success Office.

Peace Camp workshops and other notes

Conrad Grebel University College's Peace Camp will be facilitating peace-building and conflict resolution workshops with elementary school students in Waterloo Region for the third consecutive year. In May and June alone, 121 classrooms will participate in the workshops.

Striving to work within the learning objectives of the Ontario curriculum, the workshops encourage students to engage in nonviolent conflict resolution and social justice awareness.

“Conflict is normal,” says Peace Camp Coordinator Katie Gingerich. “Every day we encounter some kind of structural or interpersonal conflict. It’s important to learn how to manage these situations peacefully because we’re inevitably going to experience them. Tangible peace-building skills are the crux of our activities for students.”

In 2014, Peace Camp visited 60 classrooms. In addition to educational workshops, the Peace Camp summer day program will run from August 10 to 14 at Conrad Grebel University College for children ages 11 to 14. The camp is led by students in the College’s Peace and Conflict Studies program. Registration is now open for the 2015 camp and subsidies are available through a grant from the Kitchener Waterloo Community Foundation.

The service road between Needles Hall and Hagey Hall will be closed until Tuesday May 26 to allow for the tunnels that run between the Arts Library and Needles Hall, Arts Lecture and Modern Languages to have their roofs reinforced. This will allow for heavier trucks to drive over these tunnels. The area will be fenced off while the work is completed.