8+Science+1+Clark's+MSW+Project

Clark Currier 8 Science 1 February-March, 2010


 * __Online Homework to Reduce Paper Waste

I. Intro__** At Charlotte Country Day School, there is a lot of MSW. Part of this MSW is paper waste. This experiment is trying to reduce paper waste. If we use online homework for a week, then we will reduce paper waste around our school.
 * __II. Materials__**
 * Ms. Biggers, Mrs. Rohr, Mr. Keilty, Mr. Rinehart
 * Scale

Safety Guidelines
 * Don't work alone
 * Watch out for paper cuts
 * No horsing around

1) Organize group 2) Assign two people to a teacher (Sumner and Larson to Mr. Rhinehart, Clark and Will to Ms. Biggers, William and Emmy to Mr. Keillty, and Gordon and Thomas to Mrs. Rohr) 3) Ask teacher's permission for experiment 4) Measure homework given out for a week (8th to the 12th) 5) Record data from first week 6) After the first week, change homework to only online without using any paper for a week (22nd to the 26th) 7) Record data from second week 8) Compare data and see if online is homework is easy for teacher and classes 9) Weigh paper and calculate total weight saved from online hw
 * __III. Procedure__**

CG) Week with regular homework on paper EG) Week with online homework and no paper used

IV) Use of online homework DV) Amount of paper trash Mrs. Rohr Week w/ regular hw - 310 Week w/ online hw - 0 Ms. Biggers Week w/ regular hw - 90 pieces Week w/ online hw - 0 Mr. Rinehart Week w/ regular hw - 127 Week w/ online hw - 0 Mr. Keilty Week w/ regular hw - 73 Week w/ online hw - 0
 * __IV. Data__**


 * || Week w/ regular hw || Week w/ online hw ||
 * Ms. Biggers || 90 || 0 ||
 * Mrs. Rohr || 310 || 0 ||
 * Mr. Keilty || 73 || 0 ||
 * Mr. Rinehart || 127 || 0 ||


 * __V. Analysis__**

Our experiment was to see if using online homework would reduce paper waste at this school. The graph above shows that the week where paper homework was used 600 pieces of paper were printed out in all four of the teachers' classrooms combined. The week that they used online homework without printing out paper, only 3 pieces were printed. It is obvious that using online homework saves us from printing out pieces of paper every week. If we multiply the 600 pieces of paper used by 6, the amount of classes in a day, and then multiply that by 4, the amount of grades, and then multiply that by 180, the amount of schoold days, you would come up with 172,800 pieces of paper. If we use online homework for a week, then we will reduce paper waste at our school. In this experiment, our hypothesis was supported because in the week where online homework we used we saved about 600 pieces of paper. Since we saved almost 600 sheets of paper in a week, our hypothesis was thoroughly supported. An error during our experiment was the length of time where we collected data. We only collected data for a week and the week that we used could have been a light homework week or a heavy homework week. If we had collected for a longer period of time we could have come up with a more accurate average of the amount of paper homework the teachers give out. This is an experimental error. A challenge during this experiment was finding teachers who were willing to convert all of their homework to online paperless documents. And, even once we had found the teachers, some of them did not fully understand our instructions and forgot to count their sheets the first week. We need to give the teachers more information so that they understand what they are getting into before they do it. Our solution to reduce MSW is to use BucsNet more and to be more informative to teachers and provide them the resources to use online homework if they can not figure out how. "How many sheets of paper can be produced from a single tree?." 01 April 2000. HowStuffWorks.com.  02 March 2010.
 * __VI. Conclusion__**
 * __Bibliography__**