Clean Energy Topic: Energy Fundamentals
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Understanding Energy
In this lesson, developed by Coeur d’Alene tribal educators, students explore different types of energy, using the book “Coyote Snares the Wind” as an anchoring story, an interactive game, and hands-on activities.
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A Study of Alternative Fuels
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The Cycle Analyst
Students will use a Cycle Analyst to collect data from an electric go-kart and measure the efficiency of the system. The Cycle Analyst can be used on other small electric vehicles such as electric bicycles, scooters and golf carts.
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Creating an Electric Motor
Students will discover some properties of electromagnets. They will create their own electric motor and measuring its torque by picking up a weight over a given distance and time. With this motor, they will learn how an electric motor works and to troubleshoot for optimum operation.
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Creating an Electromagnetic Field
Student teams will work together to discover properties of electromagnets. They will work together to create their own electromagnets and experiment its strength to pick up paperclips using batteries of varying voltages. With this experiment, they will also learn about series and parallel circuits. Later lessons will require the use of these electromagnets to create…
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Experimenting with Solar Heaters
An engineering design challenge that has students first building and taking measurements from a predesigned solar water heater, then moving into designing their own solar water heater to beat the performance of the pre-designed one – 3 lessons.
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Creating the Most Effective Solar Heater
In this activity students demonstrate the ability to evaluate competing solutions to the problem of increasing the heat energy transferred to a vial of water.
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Solar Car Engineering Challenge
In this activity students demonstrate the ability to evaluate competing solutions to the problem of increasing the heat energy transferred to a vial of water.
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Manipulating Design Variables on Solar Heaters
In this activity students demonstrate the ability to evaluate competing solutions to the problem of increasing the heat energy transferred to a vial of water.
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Making the Standard Solar Heater
In this activity students will learn that sunlight energy can be transformed into other forms of energy and that the amount of sunlight energy captured by an object can be quantified and measured.
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When and Why Do We Build Dams?
Students will demonstrate basic understanding of electricity generation and basic components of a hydroelectric dam. They will research, design and test turbines for hydroelectric generation. Students will research and defend(opinion stance) various people groups and social justice factors(tribal rights, salmon protection & energy access) connected with water storage, flood/irrigation support and electricity production/distribution.
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Renewable City
This Renewable City Unit aims to help students dive in and actively explore sustainability, renewable resources, and how they might personally help solve our climate change problem. As students use multiple methods for investigating, creating, and thinking about these critical issues, they will be encouraged to develop pliable minds and action-oriented skills to address climate…
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Understanding Energy Through Wind Turbines
In this unit students will be building knowledge on what energy is and how it is harnessed, students will interact with a variety of energy stations to build an understanding on what energy is. From there students will learn about renewable energy and the difference between renewable and non-renewable energy. Students will learn how to…
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Electrical Engineering: Why Does the Electrical System Break Down?
This unit, developed through the Ambitious Science Teaching framework, attempts to create cohesive, model-based learning experience for high school level physics students to explore these concepts through the anchoring event of a power outages. They will explore our electrical system from simple circuits and the function of a switch, tracing the electrical energy back through…
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Clean Water Power: Wind, Waves, and Moving Water
This unit strives to answer the question: “How can the power of moving help communities by generating electricity?” Through a variety of lessons centered on the phenomena of the power of moving water, students will develop skills in circuits, model building, and testing. Students will explore issues surrounding clean water, energy, and careers.
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Electromagnetic Induction
This lesson builds on students’ prior knowledge about how electricity works. Students build a simple motor and test the voltage produced.
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Creating a Hydroelectric Powerplant
Students will discover a relationship between amperes and voltage to Watts as a hydro-electric powerplant produces electricity. They will work as a team to create a powerplant and measure the flow and force of electricity. The variables of air pressure will simulate different head pressures as it pertain to simple water dam design. They will…
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Solar Boats
Students are led through a comprehensive unit leading them from the basics of energy through to a culminating solar boat engineering design project (9 lessons).
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Energy Carousel: Collaborative Sensemaking on Energy and How We Measure It
This lesson aims to help students investigate answers to the questions: “What is Energy?” and “How can we see or measure energy?”. The lesson serves as a first step in understanding energy as a phenomenon and will help scaffold students’ abilities to comprehend renewable resources better later. Students observe and measure energy at 3 carousel…
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What is Energy?
In this lesson students will focus solely on the concept of what energy is. The very first thing will be to hand students a blank piece of paper and ask the students, “What is energy?” Give students a silent minute or two to write what they think energy is. Struggling students can draw what they…
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Exploring Electromagnets
Students build and test an electromagnet that will build foundational understandings into the generation of electricity and basis of our energy system.
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The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind Activity Guide
Learners will be inspired to put their own learning and imagination into action after reading the true story of, “The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind”. This is a teacher recommended lesson from Centre of Excellence for Energy.
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Energy and How We Harness it: Virtual Field Trip
In a virtual format, students will explore how energy is generated in different forms.
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Exploring Energy Stations
Students explore various forms of energy in order to distinguish between potential, kinetic, and their subcategories in order to look at the concept of transformations.
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Building Wind Turbines with the Engineering Design Process
Students will use kits to build their own model wind turbines, exploring how different variables affect the operation of the turbine and developing blueprints for designs that reflect their findings.
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Exploring Renewable Energy Resources: Water Power
Prior to undergoing their own engineering design process, students build background understanding through testing a waterwheel, observing the functionality of hydropower turbines, and developing context around regional and national hydropower resources.
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Falling Water
Students will use mathematical calculations to apply the concept of of energy transformation to a water power context. They will explore how height impacts the amount of energy generated within hydropower systems. This is a teacher recommended lesson from Teach Engineering.
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Introduction to Water Power
After discovering ways to harness the power of wind, learning how water can also generate electricity is a logical next step. This lesson allows students to understand why water is a renewable resource and how it can do work to create energy. Before creating their own hydropower model, students also observe, make predictions and test…
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Waterwheel Work: Energy Transformations and Rotational Rates
Students will use the engineering design cycle to build their own device that transfers the energy from moving water so that it can be used for a different purpose. They will then relate this to how a hydroelectric power plant works. This is a teacher recommended lesson from Teach Engineering.
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The Basics of Energy, Electricity, and Water
Students develop foundational knowledge around the functionality of hydropower generation, providing presentations on their assigned subject matter.
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How Variables Impact Hydroelectric Output
Students will interact with a hydroelectric model, testing how different variables connected to real-world design features affect the power output of the generation source.
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Turbine Blade Design Engineering
Students test the effects of manipulating variables in wind turbine design on the overall power output and effectiveness of the turbine design.
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Exploring Renewable Energy Resources: Offshore Wind
Students will build wind turbines in a variety of forms to develop a deep understanding of the function of wind turbines as well as variables that affect how successful a particular design is.
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Solar Updraft Towers
Students will combine research, direct observations, and hands on investigation to lead them into an engineering design project involving the construction of a solar updraft tower (5 lessons).
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Where Does Energy Go?
This lesson consists of six demonstration activities that show examples of ways in which water and air absorb heat to transfer energy from one place to another. These demonstration activities act as unique phenomena in which students can generate questions to lead subsequent investigations with each activity in learning centers. Through gaining content from investigations…
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Informative Writing: Where Does Energy Come From?
This lesson is a non-fiction research and writing project, which includes a differentiated choice menu and list of ideas for publishing the completed project. Each student will choose one of ten energy sources to research, including coal, natural gas, petroleum, propane, uranium, biomass, wind, geothermal, hydropower and solar. They will write a report on the…
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What is Force?
Students will build a barge out of tin foil and describe the forces acting it. The barge itself is designed only with the constraints that passengers within the barge will not get wet, allowing for students to experiment with different shapes and densities as they construct their boats. This simple design challenge has a competition…
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What is Energy Transfer?
Students will continue to build an understanding of the fundamentals of energy through observing and describing a variety of energy transformations and build on their foundational vocabulary for identifying and discussing energy concepts. In this stage of the lesson, students will engage more with examples of electrical energy, both stored and kinetic in order to…
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What is Energy?
Students will gain an understanding of the fundamentals of energy through observing a variety of energy transformations and develop a foundational vocabulary for identifying and discussing energy concepts. Students will make observations about how energy is converted between stored and kinetic forms through interacting with these changes in a station-based format. Students have the opportunity…
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Home Energy Consumption
Students will calculate the energy consumption of a set of common household devices based on their operating power rating and then investigate the power consumption of other devices in their homes.
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Developing a Model of Thermal Energy, Atoms, and Molecules
Through a series of exploration and inquiry activities, students will explain kinetic molecular theory, atomic, and molecular structures. Students will be challenged to gradually increase the precision of their explanation of molecular-level structures and motion. This lesson facilitates the students’ development of an evidence-based argument through collaboration.
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DC to AC to DC Efficiency
This lesson will continue to deal with efficiency of USB charging devices, but this time we will be using an inverter in order to create AC voltage from a battery pack, and then use a standard AC charger (what you would plug into the wall) to charge a USB device. Students will continue to use…
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Biolite – Fire to Phone Charging
This lesson continues to look at the efficiency of USB charging devices, but this time we will be using a commercially available camping stove that uses heat to create electricity in order to charge a phone. This is the Biolite stove that exploits the Peltier Junction in order to generate an electrical current. Students can…
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Activities and Assessment of Vocab and Units
This foundational and important lesson helps prepare students to efficiently collect energy data independently in the remaining sections of this unit as well as increase the longevity of the equipment used throughout. Additionally, students build their energy literacy aroud Circuitry, Electrical Energy, Energy Efficiency, Energy Fundamentals and associated units and formulas.
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Electrical Energy and Solar Module Efficiency
Students will check the effiency of solar modules using tools to obtain values that are commonly used evaluate energy efficiency of solar modules. Students will conduct their own research to derive the terms they will need to calculate a power/area ratio, and check that calculation with a pyranometer (if available). Calculations and practices that students…
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Phone Charger Efficiency
In this lesson students will explore the concept of efficiency, and how to take data in order to calculate the efficiency of various cell phone or USB charging circuits.
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Exploring Buck and Boost Converters
This lab uses a variety of voltage conversion devices to output 5 Volts, the requirements for a USB charger such as for a cell phone. Students will take data on these devices and calculate, graph and compare efficiencies of different devices. Devices used in this lab are buck converters, which lower the input voltage and…
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Designing a Solar Phone Charger
This is the culminating activity for the unit “Off the Grid.” Students will be given some restricted parameters around which to design a solar powered battery operated phone (or other USB device) charger. Included at the end of this lesson is a written assessment for the entire unit.
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Off the Grid: Energy Transformations and Efficiency
Students are led through the basics of complex circuit building, including the use of buck and boost converters, converting AC to DC and back, with the ultimate goal of designing and building a solar cell phone charger. Involves learning circuit diagramming and calculating efficiencies of various circuits and comparing based upon measurements (7 lessons).
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Designing a Sustainable City of the Future
The concept for this unit is to teach students about natural resources and renewable energy in the context of how these things impact people, communities, and the environment. They will study the actions of current and past environmental activists, learn to look critically at current energy systems, and possible solutions. The final outcome of the…
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Designing a City That Addresses Energy Needs
Students work collaboratively to design a sustainable city of the future with attention to water, energy, carbon footprint, waste, and city layout needs.
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What Are Some Possible Solutions To Current Energy Challenges?
Students explore possible solutions to current energy challenges, focusing on methane collection.
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Who Is An Activist?
This lesson introduces students to youth environmental activists involved in the work in creating an awareness about climate change issues. Students will begin to consider how they can use critical thinking to identify issues and their voice to address issues in their communities.
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What are Current Energy Systems and Challenges?
Students research and present different energy sources and challenges.
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How Does Human Use of Resources Impact the Environment?
Students learn about how human use of natural resources can impact the environment. Students create a fog catcher to make sense of the phenomenon. Students assess the impact of their actions on the environment through an ecological footprint/handprint activity.
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Natural Resources
This lesson introduces students to natural resources and creates a foundational understanding of how people use natural resources. Students will begin to understand the different forms of energy and how human activity and use of resources can impact the environment.
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Understanding E-Waste Through Battery Design
In this unit of multi-day lessons, students will further their understanding of energy, electricity, and basic circuits by focusing on batteries and e-waste. Students will build on their existing knowledge of energy, exploring how it is stored and used in everyday life, as well as the role of batteries in energy systems. Hands-on experiments with…
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Exploring Eco-Friendly Battery Design
Students will design multiple batteries using potatoes, lemons, pennies, and cola. They will use qualitative analysis to understand the voltage of each battery type. Based on their hands on experience students will understand methods to increase voltage and what makes a good battery design.
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Engineering Clean Energy For Our Community
Students will explore how different clean energy methods can power a motor. Using the engineering design process students will evaluate each energy source and relate it to e-waste concepts from previous lessons. They will learn about wind turbines and design a wind turbine. They will learn about solar power and design a solar boat. They…
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How Might We Design A Battery That Reduces E-Waste
Students explore the guiding phenomenon to understand e-waste and connect it to battery design. Students will research to ask questions, define problems and communicate information about e-waste to prepare for further exploration into electronics and battery design for the next lesson portion.
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Solar vs Wind Energy Unit
Students learn the fundamentals of energy transformation and vocabulary, electrical circuits, explore energy usage in their homes. Students then explore energy generation, including the use of magnetism and renewable energy sources.
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How much Energy do YOU use?
Students will be learn to: 1. Explain the difference between power and energy 2. Proficiently use a “Kill-A-Watt” meter to determine the power and total energy usage of everyday devices 3. Compare the total energy used by common household devices 4. Brainstorm different ways we can conserve electrical energy
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Introduction to Circuits
In this lesson students will learn how to: 1. Create a simple circuit on their own when given the appropriate materials. 2. Diagram the flow of electrons within a circuit. 3. Differentiate between series and parallel circuits.