ENGR 110 - Reflection #1

Bronco Urban Gardens Weather Station for Gardner Academy

Shane Buck
Christina McKnight
Marina Predovic

ENGR 100 is intended to be a community based engineering design class, in which

engineering students of every background come together to work on a project from a community
organization, starting from project identification through the final prototype. Our group, which is
composed of an electrical engineer, a computer engineer, and a bioengineer, convened to
collaborate on a project that falls far from any of our expertises, an elementary school weather
station. Though we all selected it for varying reasons, ranging from wanting a creative project to
not liking any of the other possibilities, we were able to develop skills in project management,
interdisciplinary collaboration, and prototyping, to create what will hopefully be an educational
and interactive tool for Gardner Academy, through the Bronco Urban Gardens (BUG) program.

After observing Lisa, our BUG liaison, interact with her students during class time in the
garden, we were able to better visualize the purpose that our weather station will serve at
Gardner Academy. For the most part, shes a very relaxed teacher who jumps around between
groups of students, making sure to answer any of their questions regarding the outdoors and
modulating their interactions with the student helpers from SCU. However, her bouncing around
doesnt mean that she lets the students get off track in their respective projects, as she has proven
to be fairly stern with them when they mentally or physically wander, or when they attempt to
get the best of the inexperienced student helpers.

In one of our first interactions with Lisa when we were planning out the location of the
actual weather station, I remember voicing my concern that the students may attempt to climb on
top of it, which was then quickly quieted by her response of the garden rules, and how in no
circumstances are the students allowed out of the eye of a supervising adult or onto a garden bed.
It is this manner of being informal, but also clear, that has made it a really pleasant learning
experience to work with our partner. She gives us the advice we need while also giving us a great
amount of appreciation for what we are doing for her.
 Another advantage to visiting the site during school hours, was that we got the
opportunity to meet with another teacher and discuss the project with her. That teacher seemed
just as excited as Lisa to finally have a weather station, and suggested that it would be a useful
tool for her lectures about the weather cycle to her first grade students. Its clear that teachers and
students from multiple grades in the elementary school will benefit from the weather station. In
addition, it is projects like these that can influence more work to be done in the garden, and for
more kids to be able to enjoy the outdoors as a learning environment. These projects are highly
likely to continue through the BUG foundation.

BUG is an organization that acts as an educational support system for socially disparaged
children, in order to increase garden awareness, ecological literacy, and nutritional health
information. From the beginning we knew that social justice would play a big role in this project,
and I believe that this is what drew us all in. Gardner Academy in particular is an underserved
school in Santa Clara County that caters primarily to spanish speaking and vietnamese speaking
students, typically from lower income families. Some of the things that we took for granted in
our schools, like access to gardens, field trips, and environmental education, may not be as
accessible to these students due to the schools limited resources and emphasis on necessary
information like math, reading, writing, etc.

We are therefore hoping that by providing the school with this weather station, well give
the students opportunities to better interact and understand how different parts of the
environment work, and allow the teachers a medium through which they can integrate their
lectures with tangible, real-life data. The children will benefit by seeing the tools which are used
to measure weather conditions, exposure which may pique their interest in the science of
meteorology or climate studies. Our weather station will include a chalkboard for daily
observations. Providing this space will allow the teachers to instruct students on taking
measurements, keeping records, and displaying data. It will enforce discipline, since the students
will need to develop a habit of taking daily readings and recording them.

Personally speaking, as a first generation immigrant, one of the struggles that I

encountered in my early childhood was the conversion between metric and imperial units, due to
the fact that my parents used solely the metric system whereas the school spoke in terms of the
imperial system. Certain instruments provided on the weather station like the thermometer, the
rain gauge, and the anemometer, will hopefully allow the students to develop a better conceptual
understanding of the actual magnitude of the metrics used in these devices. These devices will
bridge the learning gap that is often encountered in non-english speaking homes, and hopefully
provide the students with a better foundation from which they can grow and excel both in science
and other educational fields, minimizing the disparity between these students and other students
from more socioeconomically advantaged backgrounds.