Clean Energy Topic: Marine Renewable Energy
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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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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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Exploring Different Forms of Water Power
Students will build a model of a Marine Wave Generator (Kidwind Offshore Floating Wind Buoy, NEED’s Model Wav Generator Buoy, or Air Buoy) and test it to collect data and observe how water power is converted into electricity.
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Where is the Clean Water Around Me?
This lesson has students use hydropower, wave power, and wind power mapping tools to map the renewable resources around them on a large classroom map of their region, state, or North America.
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Social, Emotional, and Equity Discussions in Clean Water Power
This lesson has students jigsaw a bank of readings on the social, environmental, and equity issues with clean water power in order to make sense of how water power impacts the environment and people. Additionally, students will explore energy sovereignty and tribal energy independence in the Pacific Northwest to learn about how hydropower has impacted…
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Exploring the Impacts of Wind Turbines on Tribal Lands/Seas
Students will apply their existing knowledge of how turbines work and their environmental impact to a discussion of human impacts. This will focus specifically on Tribal lands and discussions taking place around energy development.
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Designing a Renewable City Model
Students will use their collective understandings built throughout an entire unit of sustainability topics to develop their own sustainable city. This lesson uses a variety of visual and physical hands on tools for students to make their ideas and climate solutions come to life. Students will wrap up their development by presenting their “Renewable City”…
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Spark Squad Comics
These comics use a fictional set of middle school characters to engage students in hydropower and marine renewable energy topics, with activities included in each comic for students to track their learning. This is a teacher recommended resource from National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL)
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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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Testing a Tidal Wave Attenuator
Students will test the efficiency of the tidal wave attenuator models that they previously built. They will determine variables on their models they can manipulate, such as wire gauge and magnet strength, and measure the effects of manipulating this variable on the success of their design. They will report their findings in a presentation to…
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Building a Tidal Wave Attenuator
This lesson is designed to build upon investigations of electromagnetic energy by applying these phenomena to transfer the kinetic energy moving in waves to electricity by building a wave attenuator.
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Modeling a Wave Energy Converter
This teacher-designed hands-on engineering activity for grades 7-8 walks you through building a wave energy converter to explore how waves can be used for energy.