Welcome to GET City! GET City is a Lansing, MI based year-round program for youth focused on the science and engineering of energy sustainability using advanced Information Technology.
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Have you ever thought about how much sugar is in a bottle of Coke or fruit juice? Compared to the recommended daily amount of sugar, we investigated how much sugar was in those drinks. We learned how to read the nutrition label of drinks and then determined the amount of sugar in them. To visualize the sugar amounts, we poured sugar in each measured amount into a cup. We were very surprised to see that the amount of sugar in a small bottle of coke was similar to the daily recommended amount! We are drinking a lot of sugar!
Have you ever played with data like a scientist? Today, we did. Using data that we collected from grocery stores, we learned how to put the datasets into Google Spreadsheets, merge them together, and analyze them. We found something fascinating in the data! We also thought about how we could improve our data collection process, based on the analysis. We looked like real scientists today!
Guess what we gave our friends as gifts for Valentine Day? Candy? Chocolate? No! None of those! We gave them healthy smoothies, made by using a bike blender! Do you know what the bike blender is? When you pedal the bike attached to the blender, you generated the power needed to make delicious smoothies. No plug-in electricity is used. It is environmental friendly and cool!!!
GET City is exploring food around our community from different perspectives: Energy, health and justice. Last week we took a field trip to Market Fresh. While there we had to pick a healthy snack that would feed 20 people for under $20. The task helped us see that it was hard to find something cheap and healthy. We also interviewed people (customers, staff, etc.) about their opinion of the store and what they wanted to see change. We plan to take more field trips to different food places to gather more information. Cami
 “Buttons 4 Bears” By Cami Great news! Cami and Quahn won awards in the state-wide 2012 Young Innovators Competition sponsored by the Prima Civitas Foundation. Participants in this competition answered the following question: If you could invent anything to improve your community, what would it be and why?
Cami won first place in the 6-8th grade division with her creative initiative “Buttons for Bears”, which raises awareness about climate change for people in the Lansing area. Quahn won second place in the same division for his design of a video game “Grand Climate Change Video Game”. This game is for children and adults to learn new energy behaviors and why they are important. Click on the links above to see their original entries.
 “Grand Climate Change” By Quahn
 
GET City had a food taste test to understand how processed foods are different from non-processed foods. We tasted different kinds of foods, such as fruit snacks versus fresh fruits, and bakery wheat bread versus Wonder bread. Then we tried to answer some questions: Which food do you prefer? Which food do you think is healthier? How many ingredients are in each food? We also talked about why we want to know what is in the food and what we want to know more about foods.
As a bonus, we had special guests today. The crew of “LRN101″, an educational TV show based in Greater Lansing, visited GET City to shoot interviews with us about our experience in the GET City program and some footage of the activities today. The show will air online at LRNsomething.org and locally on City TV and WKAR. It’s awesome!
The spring session has kicked off with our fabulous GET Citizens! This Spring we’ll address issues of food and the environment in our community. As a starting point, we interviewed our peers about food: what they usually eat for breakfast, where their family buys groceries, and how they think food connects to the environment. We recorded the interviews on iPads and make them fun!
On December 18, we had time to celebrate our winners in the Lansing Board of Water and Light’s “Energy Saves” video contest at the Boys and Girls Club of Lansing. The Board of Water and Light awarded GET City members a $2,000 check for one first-place entry and two second-place entries. “We judged videos based on four areas. Creativity, visual effectiveness, message clarity, and quality. GET City kids submitted three videos. They are all fabulous!” said Sue Warren, manager of the BWL. Congratulations GET City! You can read more about this award in the Lansing State Journal.
We have investigated about how climate change causes severe weather like Hurricane Sandy for weeks. Today, we reviewed what we have learned with a board game modified from a Korean traditional board game (called Yut Nori). We tossed four wooden sticks in the air and moved our board pieces on the board based on the arrangement of sticks. Enjoying the game, we also tried to answer some questions about climate change and Hurricane Sandy, such as how we can reduce the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and how Hurricane Sandy is related to climate change. It was really fun!!!
 GET City is about taking action through science. We, the youth of GET City, are working on a story to teach others about this. Some of the ideas that we talk about are: 1) what is taking action, 2) what are some of things that we do in GET City to take action in science and in our community, and 3) what others should know if they want to take action in science too. Once we’re done, we will post it for you. In this picture I am helping to demonstrate an experiment about energy efficiency. We had a green carnival where we tried to teach others about how to take action on green energy issues!
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