environmental problems about water resources in four countries along One Belt and One Road

School name: Shanghai Foreign Language School

R&S group name: SFLS RNS

Grade of students: All grades at school

Number of students: 36

Writer of this report and his(or her) contact info: Wang Qifan 15000610313 wqf1578@163.com

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1. Name of the activity: “Water Crisis” International Festival Club Exhibition

Theme of the activity: environmental problems about water resources in four countries along One Belt and One Road

2. Goal for the activity: to enable participants to have a better understanding of the environmental problems along One Belt and One Road so that participants can take lessons from the cases of the four countries and apply them to the real life, thus realizing the importance of environmental protection.

1. Time frame

1. The date of beginning and ending: 2017.9.28 – 2017.11.17
2. Process of the activity:

4. Money spent for the activity:

5. Assistance provided by other people:

Cyprus: Panos Nicolaou

Russia: Елизавета Шварц

Palestine: Tawfiq Abuaita, Lyne Sadek Shweiki

6. Members who worked on the activity:

1. Number of members:18
2. Tasks of the members:

1. Information collection and question preparation for Q&A Game:

Note: Information about the four countries, i.e. China, Russia, Cyprus and Palestine are included in the literature review, while impact of water crisis on ecosystems and desalination are themes of the workshop.

2. Other preparation tasks

3. Club exhibition organizing

7. Approximate number of students impacted by our activity: 40-50

1. Approximate number of hours spent by group members on the activity

9. How the activity went:

The activity was divided into three parts: games, literature review and workshops.

1. Games: Mini-games were the main activities of the club exhibition, which fell into four, including poem writing, crosswords, puzzles and Q&A games.

Poem writing: Participants will pick from a deck of cards and use the keyword to create a three-line poem with the theme of environmental protection.

Crosswords: Participants will fill in the crosswords, which will help them to solve the ultimate question about environmental protection.

Puzzles: Participants will have to find all the missing pieces of pictures of rivers and lakes and fit them into the appropriate countries.

Q&A games: Participants will receive a beaker of water at the beginning of the game. They will have to answer a couple of questions in order to prevent their water from being polluted. The one with the cleanest water wins.

2. Literature review: The literature review was written before the exhibition. The review was based on the information collected beforehand and was supposed to include the introduction of the problems of water resources in the four countries along One Belt and One Road, the causes of the problems, the problems generated by the water crisis as well as measures taken to treat the problems.

1. Workshops: Introduce different approaches to desalination and the advantages and disadvantages of these methods from the perspective of ecology and economy; introduce cases that demonstrate the impacts of water crisis on ecosystems so that participants will realize the significance of environmental protection.

10. Reflection:

The whole group made a lot of effort to prepare the activity and increase the diversity of the forms of activities. However, a lot of activity organizers and visitors were not able to come to the final exhibition because they had to rehearse for the closing ceremony of the International Festival in the afternoon. Furthermore, the school hadn’t made a lot of advertising for the exhibition, so a lot of students knew nothing of the club exhibition. Therefore, the most participants who came to the exhibition were students in junior grades, and a lot of activities and fruits of our preparation were not carried out.

However, all the participants have formed a basic understanding of the environmental problems in the four countries through the games; as for the organizers (members who worked on the activity), they’ve practiced English a lot while searching for all kinds of information, and they have formed an in-depth understanding of related topics.

11. Suggestions to improve the activity:

Besides all the aforementioned problems, the focus of the activity was not so appropriate – the expectation that the activity was both academic and interesting was not completely reached. A lot of efforts made on literature review and workshops were not paid off. The solution might be to integrate the information from literature view and workshops into the games, or to hold workshops within the group beforehand and focus on games on the club exhibition, which is open to all students.

The advertising of the activity was also a problem. The Wechat official account article was not published until the evening before the activity, which made it impossible for a great many students to be informed of the activity on the next day. The solution is to lay more emphasis on advertising and publish articles a few days before the activities.

12. Goals for the next activity:

We will have club exhibitions next semester during the Chinese Festival. Our goal is to combine traditional Chinese culture with the concept of environmental protection, and to make participants have fun while learning at the same time.