Photo Courtesy Of http://www.kukuicup.org/
By Staff Reports
(Honolulu)– More than 1,000 UH Mānoa students living in four Hale Aloha residence halls are engaging in a friendly competition to see which tower is the most environmentally conscious. The first-year students are embarking on the second annual Quest for the Kukui Cup, a nearly year-long energy and sustainability challenge to reduce energy usage while increasing energy literacy.
“What makes the Kukui Cup unique is that it combines energy education, prizes, real-time energy use feedback, online gaming, and real-world experiences to encourage life-long changes in energy use on personal and societal levels,” said challenge organizer Philip Johnson, a UH Mānoa Professor of Information and Computer Sciences.
The Quest for the Kukui Cup started in the first week of September 2012, with an intensive first month of the challenge featuring 19 energy-related excursions and workshops, including a trip to O‘ahu’s H-POWER waste-to-energy generation facility. It also involved a poetry slam with Kealoha, Hawai‘i’s first official Poet Laureate.
Along the way, UH Mānoa students will make public commitments and complete other activities toward their goal of saving energy, inspiring others and winning the cup.
The challenge runs through the Spring 2013 semester. Teams at Hawai‘i Pacific University and the East-West Center are also holding Kukui Cup challenges this fall, assisted by the UH Kukui Cup team. In 2013, organizers hope to make the Kukui Cup challenge available island-wide.
For more information on the Kukui Cup, visit www.kukuicup.org. To watch the introductory video, visit http://youtube/EJc0mXS7JCo.
The Kukui Cup project is sponsored by the UH Mānoa Center for Renewable Energy and Island Sustainability, Student Housing Services, Facilities Management and Department of Information and Computer Sciences, as well as the National Science Foundation, HEI Charitable Foundation and Hawaiian Electric Company.