Climate Detectives Projects 2022-2023


Project topic: Weather measurements

Project title: Save Water, Save Life, thus Save the World!

Team: SPMC EcoSchool Boys

St Paul’s Missionary College   Rabat   Malta   17 Student’s age: 8-9 years old, 10-11 years old

Research question

How does climate change effect the level of rain water during the years in Malta, and finding different ways how we can conserve more water efficiently?

Summary of the project
Students recording measurements of rain water, water in the reservoir and water used in the cisterns daily.

Before we embarked on this project we studied all the good practices that the school already holds like: a huge water reservoir which feeds all the flushing system at our Primary school and push taps in all the bathrooms to reduce water wastage. We also wanted to quantify the amount of water being used. We partnered with the national Energy and Water Agency who supported us throughout. They sponsored and helped us instal a water meter level sensor to record the amount of rainfall collected in our school’s water reservoir, and installed a rain gauge to record the amount of rainfall each day. The school installed another water meter reader to record the amount of water used at the school. After recording the data from these three instruments, the students placed water hippos inside the toilet flushings and record the data. Graphs and tables were drawn from these results and the amount of water saved was calculated. We shared our findings with parents to inspire others to do the same.

Main results and Conclusions
A Graph Showing cubic meters of water used in the Cisterns during the months of January, February and March

The water hippos were installed on the 17th of March. As can be seen from the graphs the gradient of the graph in the month of March is less than the gradients of January and Febuary. This means that when we installed the water hippos in all the classes’ cisterns, there was a significant decrease in water consumption.
This concludes that during this short period in recording water measurements, small actions such as installing water hippos have a great impact in water preservation.

What’s Next? Actions to make a difference and help lessen the problem
Water poster competition held at the school promoting water conservation.

Considering that the world is experiencing climate change and Malta is particluary experiencing very hot and dry summers, little actions make a big difference. Out next step is to deliver this message, by showing actual results, to the rest of the school community. Thus we continue to create awareness and promoting the implementation of such small actions to save water.

Project poster:

Download project poster PDF

Projects are created by the teams and they take the full responsibility of the shared data.
← All projects