Two-day maker workshop with Ashesi Design Lab, Penn State’s Alliance for Education, Science, Engineering and Design with Africa, and the AIR Centre, a trans-national research consortium. Part of developing the “scanopy” environmental sensor for third-generation AMP spacecraft.
In January 2016 AMP ran a one-week #ampqamp with students from Princeton University’s PACE Center for Civic Engagement focused on making short health & safety videos for the Agbogbloshie scrap dealers community, narrated in Dagbani.
This group of students, led by Ellie Sell ’17 and Christie Jiang ’17, opted not only to volunteer collaborating on the AMP project as a form of ‘alternative spring break’, but also to spend months prior planning their trip and conducting research around issues of health and safety related to unregulated e-waste processing plus weeks after their visit to Ghana editing and producing the videos. (They blogged about it here.)
Watch the Youtube playlist of videos they produced below. For more on how this connects to the full AMP project, check out this Q&A with the Princeton PACE Center. A huge thank you to the whole team from all of AMP!
Here are a few pictures from the first qamp, held yesterday under an “abrofo nkatie” (tropical almond) tree in Community 18, Tema. We discussed several projects that relate to teaching and learning about the environment in informal contexts.
Rene Neblett, Founding Director of the Kokrobitey Institute presented the flash card-based curriculum on environmental education that she has developed as supplement to her initiative Ghana School Bags, which recycles billboards and other waste plastic materials into locally-made backpacks for school children in Ghana. “P is for pollution…..”
Dr. Victor Atiemo-Obeng, a chemical engineer who recently opened the Ghana office of Dow Chemical Company, where until recently he served at the rank of Dow Fellow, gave an introduction to the concept of turbidity – a measure of the number of particles suspended in a given fluid, an important aspect of water quality – and how to measure it. We took samples of water from various sources – but have to wait 48 hours to observe the results. He also explained the science behind bio-sand filters such as Hydraid, a low-cost water filter available locally in Ghana.
The science behind water quality is critical to understanding the e-waste ecosystem. Bio-sand water filters can eliminate pathogens such as bacteria, viruses and spores but not contaminates like heavy metals which can be found in e-waste dump sites like Agbogbloshie.
Hassan Salih gave an update on Accratopia (also a Facebook group), a collaboration of architects, artists, illustrators, photographers, poets and other creatives to explore the potentials of Accra’s urban future as utopia. What can a remade Agbogbloshie look like after its post-apocalyptic present?
AMP 