We receive mail at home and at work six days a week but rarely consider the impact the postal system has on humans and the environment. The U.S. mail travels by truck, bike, mule train, or Segway (PDF), whether along dirt roads or super highways, to reach the densest city neighborhoods and scattered rural ranches. Figuring out the “greenest” way to get it there is a challenge that the US Postal Service (USPS) takes seriously. It’s also a challenge that the Smithsonian National Postal Museum turned over to a group of thirteen-year-olds.
Teens supervise the “invention lab” where museum
visitors try to create a “green” mail delivery vehicle.
The “test driver” in the lab coat makes sure the vehicles
are up to speed on the following criteria: safety,
reliability, speed, and cost.
The 15 “green teens” took charge of planning the Green Ways to Move the Mail Family Festival during a workshop in March 2009. Even the unflappable teenagers were impressed by the sheer size of the postal system on which we depend for birthday cards, coupons, Pottery Barn catalogs, and Netflix. With the world’s largest civilian fleet, USPS drives more than 1.2 billion miles each year. In 2007, USPS delivered to 147,992,522 addresses, and two million addresses are added annually. Despite recent drops in mail volume, the vast system that moves our mail has dramatic impact on the environment.
Teens can recycle their bulk mail or read magazines online, but none of us can immediately affect how mail gets to our door. So the focus of the Festival was not our personal behaviors. Rather, the program used mail transportation as a challenge to teach systems thinking, team work, problem solving, and interdisciplinary knowledge. By teaching others during the festival, teens honed their communication skills and tested out a day in the life of a museum educator.
Museum visitors had five different activity tables to explore at the event.
At the “Rocky Roads: Going Green on the Mean Streets” station, teens offered visitors a set of four oversized die. Rolling the dice presented the visitor with a mail route, including factors such as landscape, mail volume, population density, and distance from the closest post office. Faced with these variables, the teens helped the visitors select the greenest mail vehicle for that route. In the video, you’ll see the teens encourage visitors’ critical thinking by asking questions and making thoughtful observations.
Teens facilitate a green game: pick the best mail vehicle for different delivery routes!
Teens at another activity invited visitors to design and test a prototype of the “perfect mail delivery vehicle,” a real-life challenge USPS engineers face every day. Teen “test drivers” in lab coats provoked problem-solving skills by urging visitors to explain how their vehicles met the design criteria—the vehicles had to be safe, reliable, fast, inexpensive, and green. Prototypes included a fancy monorail for long distance mail, a “genetically modified kangaroo” (airmail based on kangaroos’ bouncing energy), and a train that ran only on popcorn. While USPS might balk at the idea of marsupial mail, the test drivers gave these innovations the green light because visitors were able to demonstrate that their inventions met the criteria.
USPS Senior Mechanical Engineer Robert Garris gives
teens a tour of a hydrogen fuel cell vehicle that
delivers mail in Washington, DC.
“The Shocking History of the Electric Car” dispelled the myth that electric vehicles have only recently been used to deliver the mail. Faced with a jumbled timeline, museum visitors had to use clues provided by the teens to figure out when the first electric vehicle delivered mail in the US. You may be shocked to learn the answer: 1899. History teachers won’t be surprised that the game helped establish a historical foundation for considering future change.
More than 170 visitors enjoyed the festival and appreciated the teens’ hard work. In the post-festival wrap-up, the teens excitedly shared stories of their visitor interactions and how their activities worked. “Visitors were like, ‘Wow you’re only 13 and you put this together!’ So that was cool,” said one teen who had created a scavenger hunt of the museum’s different mail vehicles.
The participating green teens may grow up to be the engineers, technologists, and problem solvers who find innovative solutions to stop climate change. The knowledge and skills they learned through Green Ways to Move the Mail will serve them well no matter where their journey takes them.
Erin Blasco is Public Programs Coordinator and Aurélie Henry is the Education Technology Specialist at the Smithsonian National Postal Museum.
