Stuyvesant Environmental Club Hosts Virtual Earth Day Fair

The Stuyvesant Environmental Club (SEC) hosted its annual Earth Day Fair on April 23. The two-hour-long virtual event hoped to bring awareness to environmental issues.

The Earth Day Fair aimed to demonstrate support and educate on the various environmental changes. “We wanted to raise awareness for a lot of environmental issues and also spread a bit of positivity, just because we know this year has been super stressful,” senior and SEC president Sakina Gulamhusein said. “[We wanted to have] people enjoy Earth and maybe encourage people to go outside a little bit or clean up after their trash—those little things.”

This year’s Earth Day fair theme focused specifically on Earth Appreciation. “We wanted to make the fair about appreciating all that the Earth does for us rather than dwelling on negative environmental news,” junior and SEC secretary Nour Kastoun said.

While the SEC’s first virtual Earth Day Fair, which was held last year, was open only to SEC members, the SEC opened the fair to the entire student body this time as they had more time to prepare. “The leaders wanted to create an event that would include the participation of the entire student body of the school,” junior and SEC member Daniel Leong said.

The fair started off with an introduction of the club, and then in three cycles. It was then structured so that attendees could choose the activities they were interested in participating in. “Each cycle contained four different breakout rooms [and in] each breakout room, a group of club members presented about a different topic,” Kastoun said. “Each breakout room also had a different presentation style. Between each cycle, attendees reconvened in the main room to use Zoom whiteboard annotations to write about what they learned in their breakout rooms.”

One of the activities was a game that Leong helped create. “We created a role-playing game that was inspired by the game Dungeons & Dragons. The audience would be presented with certain scenarios that they would have to solve with the available materials and their thinking,” Leong said.

This layout differed from the traditional, in-person Earth Day fairs where SEC members would set up presentations in the cafeteria. “In person, it’s super bustling,” Gulamhusein said. “Everybody just comes in, looks at a board, the members are presenting their own little thing. There's food, there’s games, all the fun kinds of aspects in a fair.”

However, the cabinet ran into several technical challenges in adjusting the Earth Day fair to a virtual environment. “We faced a lot of obstacles in preparing for the fair, the main one being designing the structure of the fair such that it didn't last longer than 1.5 to two hours and was simultaneously fun and educational for attendees,” Kastoun said. “We also had to adjust for possible technical difficulties and work out Zoom logistics.”

Despite these difficulties, the cabinet found the fair to be successful. “We had a really great turnout (almost 200 people) that was slightly unexpected, but very exciting,” Kastoun said. “Thankfully, the fair ran smoothly without any technical difficulties, and attendees seemed to enjoy the different activities.”

Students and faculty members alike shared positive opinions of the fair. “I could barely imagine the SEC could successfully bring all that fun and excitement, not to mention interaction, to a virtual setting, but they absolutely did.” Assistant Principal of Pupil Personnel Services Casey Pedrick said in an e-mail interview.

The attendees also gained newfound knowledge from the presentations. “I had no idea that bees had a separate stomach for storing the nectar. And that, when they return to the hive, they regurgitate the nectar and pass it along to another bee,” Pedrick said.

Sophomore Hailey Seltzer added, “I enjoyed the storybook-type activities that were shown. Basically, the presenters role-played as bees and had a storyline.”

Junior Ivy Jiang found the research shown at the fair thought-evoking. “I learned several fun facts about the Earth and our environment such as honey is actually bee vomit, ants can lift twenty times their body weight, bees pollinate nine out of 10 crops humans eat, and three percent of the water on Earth is drinkable,” she said in an e-mail interview. “These facts only accentuate why Earth is such an interesting place and the need for us to protect it.”

Ultimately, SEC board members felt that the fair surpassed her expectations, especially as it took a virtual format this year. “The energy in the room was super great [...] [W]e had the whiteboard presentation, where we’d have people draw on the Zoom thing so they’d have something fun to do. That kind of made the room lighter, and more people willing to talk because of that,” Gulamhusein said. “[The fair] went perfectly according to plan. I was really happy with how that went.”