The World Trade Center

A tragedy of immeasurable proportion hit our great city, and the beautiful buildings of the World Trade Center no longer exist.

I remember the year 1988 when my students were honored at City Hall for the computer project "Refuse-to-Energy." Back then, to give a sense of magnitude, my students imagined the twin towers to be two big garbage pails. They wrote a program, below, to compute the amount of refuse for a specific number of days.

I also remember my students visiting the World Trade Center area with the Salvadori class. They were sketching the twin towers, walking to the waterfront, always surprised at the fact that the World Trade Center towers were 1,350 ft high and could swing as much as 7 ft (2 m) on each side of the vertical under strong gusts. The Salvadori class dealt with the build environment, with "real life" subjects, and it was an exciting way for the students to learn the mathematics and the pertinent physics through the world around them.

Joan of Arc students at the WTC	Sketching the twin towers
At the World Financial Center	Sketching the World Financial Center

 

REFUSE-TO-ENERGY PROJECT DESCRIPTION

The project, "TEAM-UP-TO-CLEAN-UP", is a computer simulation that explains the operation of a REFUSE-TO-ENERGY plant, as an alternative to landfilling, and the problem of garbage disposal in a big city like New York City.

The project is an educational computer program created by a team of 8th grade students at Joan of Arc, JHS 118 in Manhattan, Spring of 1987, as part of the annual "Team-up-to-clean-up" campaign sponsored by the New York City Department of Sanitation, and the Board of Education.

The student participants and members of the Computer Club at Joan of Arc: Juan Arias, Felix Colfer. Miguel Paredes, Rolando Rodriguez, and Idowu Wheeler.

Students at Joan of Arc decided to address the problems of waste disposal in New York City by familiarizing themselves with the operation and benefits of a refuse-to-energy plant. They wanted to generate a comprehensive computerized program which would explain their findings to the public. Students started by creating scrapbooks with news items related to New York's problems. Unlike the previous year when Logo II was used for all computer projects, this year the newly introduced LogoWriter computer language, which allows for graphics as well as word processing, was used.

Students worked one day a week at Bank Street College using the library with Seth Chaiklin to learn about the various technologies of incineration. Occasionally, they also used the Bank Street computer facility.

The main work was done at Joan of Arc where students worked for 3-4 hours every day after school for four months. Students transferred their diagrams and summaries to the computer. Regular meetings were held to discuss the project, to share ideas, and to see how the whole project was proceeding.

Students visited the refuse-to-energy facility in Peekskill, New York to familiarize themselves with the operation of an incinerator. They also received, besides a free lunch, many brochures and technical data they were later able to use in the project. Each student worked on a specific topic, e.g. "plant components," "the processes of incineration," and each gained knowledge that was shared with the group, including the many technical problems encountered with the new LogoWriter language.

In creating the program where the World Trade Center towers are imagined to be two garbage pails, the students called for information about the towers' size. They found the volume they needed for the simulation. Students frequently called the New York City Department of Sanitation for additional information. Their total involvement with the project became clear to me when they showed up one morning bringing to class subway posters saying:

The real task came when they put all programs together in a superprocedure for the final diskette. They worked at Bank Street College with Seth Chaiklin and Michael Tempel on weekends and holidays when our facilities at Joan of Arc were closed. These were days of great activity and interaction on the computers. Some of the generated material had to be omitted due to the space limitation of the diskette. Nevertheless, it was a great learning experience and the results were very encouraging. The project was an award winner in Manhattan and the students were given the awards in a ceremony at City Hall by Mayor Edward I. Koch.  

Procedures