Clean Energy Topic: Thermal Energy
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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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Optimal and Sustainable: Renewable Energy Revamp
In this lesson, students will be challenged with an optimization problem. The fictitious town of Solutionville has decided to replace coal, their current source for electricity, with more sustainable energy sources. In designing Solutionville’s sustainable energy future, students must consider not only the geographic constraints of various renewable energy options–wind energy, hydroelectric power, geothermal energy,…
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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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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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Learning About Solar Updraft Towers
This lesson helps students learn about solar updraft towers being planned and built around the world to help solve the energy crisis by using unlimited power from the sun. This will provide real world context to the engineering challenge they engaged in during the previous lesson. A video is shown to the class; then students…
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Let’s Build Our Wind and Solar Energy Toy
Students will combine what they learned in previous lessons using their investigations of convection-related phenomena to design a device that will convert light energy from the sun into thermal energy and utilize the resulting convection currents. Their primary objective will be to design a device that uses energy from the sun when placed on a…
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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 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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Chemical Differences in Emergency Energy Sources
In the context of preparing a disaster supply kit, students develop atomic and molecular models of energy resources, analyze combustion of various fuels and build circuits. They then research and evaluate the impacts of converting natural resources into PV cells. Finally, students engineer a hand warmer that uses an exothermic chemical reaction (5 lessons).
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Engineering a Hot Pack
Through a series of inquiry activities, students will discover the properties of the chemical reaction of dissolving CaCl2 in water, the effect of stirring, and of adding baking soda and sodium polyacrylate crystals. Once initial data is collected, students will share preliminary data through the collaborative inquiry gallery walk protocol practiced in Lesson 2, test…
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Fuels and PV Cells
Students will return to the phenomena of energy resources to support safety, health, and comfort in an emergency situation. They will distinguish between how common materials provide energy and develop an understanding of how the atomic and molecular structure of the resource differs and leads to different optimal applications of the resource in an emergency…
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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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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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Bioreactor Water Heating
Students are guided through the concepts of solar and biomass heating as well as water pumping to design a water pumping system that uses multiple technologies to avoid water freezing in winter.
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Bioreactor Water Circulation System
Together we explore the feasibility of using heated water in a bioreactor to circulate water through a trough or pipe system to outdoor water sources from freezing in the winter. This will be done by utilizing a solar water pump and a compost bioreactor. Additionally, students will explore whether such a system could be used…
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Compost Bioreactor Design
Students will research the science and proper maintenance of composting to create their own bioreactors. Using their research they will adjust their compost for maximum heat production used to heat water.
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Passive Solar Water Heating
Students will utilize milk jugs to understand the how to optimize the sun’s ability to heat the water contained within. By recording their observations and calculating the joules of energy absorbed students will gain understanding of the energy of the sun.