WSU Imagine Tomorrow Competition

http://www.imagine.wsu.edu/

Due to the shortness of the timeline WSU gives us, our decision about which teams to send to the Imagine Tomorrow event will be based on the strength and development of the ideas in this document and the perceived ability of the team to see them through to completion. Regardless of whether or not you go, all teams will be working with this idea for the next 5 months and presenting their work, at the very least, at the Symposium in May.

How would you power your future?

As the world transitions to alternate energy sources, people have to make fundamental changes in the way they operate. In this high school energy competition, your team’s task is to explore ways to enable some aspect of this transition. What types of inventions or redesigns will be needed to take full advantage of the new energy sources? How will suburbs, towns, and cities need to be redesigned? What types of behavior changes will be necessary, and how do we bring those about?

NAME
PROJECT TITLE
Which of the 4 challenge(s) at the end of this document does this idea fit into?
Brief summary of project and/or Idea? This would be 50-200 word abstract of your project (including your hypothesized results and implications)
Clearly DEFINE your measurable objective in this project:
  1. What exactly is your objective and/or hypothesis?
  2. How is your objective relevant to the competition topic?
  3. How workable is your solution to powering the future? Describe how the average user would accept this? Justify how economically feasible this is.
  4. Explain how your results or solution could be successfully utilized in design of a project or product?

Project creativity and originality:
  1. Describe what about your approach to the problem is unique
  2. Assess to what degree your redesign of existing equipment/technology or construction/design of new equipment is creative and original.

Challenge 1. Technology: Invent or re-design a machine or process that uses sustainable technologies for energy production, consumption, and conservation.

Challenge 2. Design: Design a living/working space (a building, suburb, town, or city) that has significantly lower CO2 emissions than at present.

Challenge 3. Behavior: Consider the question of why people are resistant to adopting and implementing alternate sources of energy. Document a personal or social quality that contributes to this resistance, or demonstrate an intervention that can be applied at the personal, local, or societal level to encourage people to consider and adopt alternate energy sources.

Challenge 4. Multidisciplinary Collaboration: It is clear that viable approaches to a sustainable energy future require contributions from multiple disciplines and perspectives. Develop a project that incorporates expertise from at least two distinct disciplines to address some aspect of the shift toward alternate sources of energy. The disciplines must be distinctly and demonstrably different, and it must be clear that each is making a significant contribution to the overall project.