Hey! We are a group of six transition year students currently participating in the Power of One Competition. Power of One is a national government sponsored pilot scheme and our school is lucky enough to be one of only twenty in the country to have been chosen to take part.

The competition requires us to research, design and implement an innovative marketing campaign promoting energy efficiency targeted at primary school children, teenagers and adults. We decided to focus mainly on the primary school children and have put an enormous amount of time and effort into this project. We hope you enjoy the webpage and take on board some of our advice!

Our team; Máire Costello, Sorcha Forde, Sarah McNally, Orna Donnelly, Éadaoin Copeland and Rebecca Dolan

For the primary school area of our campaign we prepared a workshop for a Second class in St Patrick’s Primary School, Skerries. This workshop included our song ’Global Warming, SAY WHAT?!’, of which both the lyrics and music were written by our very own Éadaoin Copeland and Máire Costello. We also created an art activity pack to teach the children about energy efficiency in a fun way as well as presenting to them a Power Point presentation. We created and designed a poster of our logo for their classroom which the children also contributed to.We also spoke to the primary school teacher about introducing a merit system to motivate the children to be energy efficient in a competitive manner.

For the secondary school section of our project we created a Power Point presentation to be shown to a class of second years in our school. We then designed and set up this web page and carried out a survey to calculate the carbon footprints of the students in class 2G. Please view the results below…! We are also in the midst of planning an energy efficiency awareness day for second years. This will include; showing the film ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ by Al Gore, a tree-planting ceremony and the possibility of selling Climate Change Chocolate. The idea of the tree-planting is to offset some of our carbon emissions, which we build up by over-using energy.

Finally, for the adults, we have designed and printed a selection of small cards which include an energy saving tip and illustration on each. These cards will be distributed in a busy location in Balbriggan. We are also planning an energy efficiency awareness coffee morning in in which we will distribute information cards and we are hoping that our local Green Party representative, Trevor Sargent, will attend.

Here are a selection of the pictures which will appear on our energy efficiency information cards, along with a selection of tips, directed towards adults:

Below we have a few simple yet effective tips which were printed on our cards alongside the pictures that can alsohelp you to be more energy efficient...

General Tips Use rechargeable batteries instead of normal ones; normal batteries take 50 times the amount of energy to make them than you get out of them! Buy Irish products when you have the choice, they have smaller carbon footprint than products that have to be imported into the country. Have a shower instead of a bath. A full bath uses 200 litres of water whereas a shower uses 150 (approx.) Close your curtains in the evening to stop heat escaping. Turn off lights when your leaving the room and if there is enough natural light available don't turn them on at all. Don’t leave on stand-by lights on electrical appliances.

Tips for around the school   When you are walking through the senior or junior social area and there are three lights on, turn off two. One is plenty! If you are in a classroom with the radiators on and you get too hot, don’t open the windows, turn the radiators off! When you are in the computer room, make sure that all the standby lights are off. Every little helps! And finally, wear enough layers of clothing - it's the most environmentally considerate way to keep warm.

Calculate your own carbon footprint! Click this link to find out just how environmentally friendly you are...