By Scott Asakawa on January 29, 2013 4:30 PM |
Right now, this moment, as I type, off the top of my head, I can count at least 7 devices in my cubicle that require electrical energy in order to function. That’s not counting our office’s overhead lighting system, the heating, or any of the other building-wide stuff. I’m just talking about things I can pick up. My laptop, its external monitor, my phone, my other phone, the lamps that I use at night to keep my space bright and work-friendly, the coffeemaker that keeps me bright and work-friendly…every one of these things requires electricity, and I use each of them every day, for hours. Often, I use energy without even thinking about it. The bills are paid, and services keep coming, seemingly limitless in supply.
The truth, however, isn’t nearly so idyllic. In the United States, we burn more than 100,000 tons of coal and nearly 800,000 barrels of oil every hour of every day in order to meet our energy needs. Coal and oil are fossil fuels, and they are anything but limitless. What’s more, their conversion into usable energy pollutes our environment and is a contributing factor of climate change. Our energy needs only continue to rise as our society becomes more and more reliant on electrical devices, so one sometimes wonders why technologies like Sweden’s Lillgrund Wind Farm or the SEGS solar arrays in California haven’t been leveraged effectively to solve our energy problems.
With NOVA’s Energy Lab, students learn just how complicated our energy crisis is despite the development of new tools. Through a series of video modules, students hear just how energy is defined, and about how we convert energy from various sources into the kinds of power we need in our daily lives. Students explore the promise of renewable energies like wind and solar, but they also learn about the challenges associated with using those renewables on a larger scale.
Once students have wrapped their minds around the contexts of today’s energy landscape, they jump into the online lab space and learn firsthand how complex the battle for clean renewable energy is. The Energy Lab’s Research Challenge charges students with the task of building efficient new energy infrastructures for cities across the U.S. Students use real scientific data gathered from the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) as well as the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) to organize systems using renewable sources. There’s added incentive in this lab, as students compete with others to see whose designs can, given cost constraints, produce the most power.
As with all NOVA Labs, the Energy Lab includes an Educator Guide that can help you think of ways to use the Labs as a productive part of your classroom experience. NOVA Education has also produced a webinar to help walk teachers through the online resource.
All in all, the Energy Lab is a great opportunity for students to use tools provided by NOVA to learn through experience about the challenges of energy production and consumption. Far from being a service taken for granted on a daily basis, NOVA’s Energy Lab helps put energy usage in the foreground for future professionals, a space in which it will need to remain if those future professionals are to solve our looming energy challenges.
By Maiken Lilley on August 17, 2012 9:33 AM |
As you begin the new school year, you might like to know what other teachers are using in their classrooms. The following are NOVA Education’s 10 most popular teacher guides. They cover everything from dogs and fish to DNA and the miracle of life. You too might want to try them out!
Listed in order of popularity:
- Create a DNA Fingerprint—Create a DNA fingerprint and then compare it to the fingerprint of seven suspects to nab a perpetrator.
- Dogs and More Dogs—Learn through an evolution card game how selective pressures can affect an organism’s evolution.
- Treasures of the Great Barrier Reef —Classify fish based on their different characteristics.
- Cracking the Code of Life—Explore the process involved in sequencing the human genome by decoding simulated nucleic acid sequences.
- Super Bridge—Explore compression, tension, and torsion by constructing a spaghetti bridge that can hold a coffee-can-and-cardboard roadbed.
- The Missing Link—Collect, analyze, and interpret information about objects in order to classify them in a cladogram.
- Dying to Be Thin—Collect and analyze data about how healthy people are portrayed in the media. Use data to learn more about healthy lifestyles.
- Secrets of Lost Empires: II Pharaoh‘s Obelisk—Discover how levers work by raising a brick with shish kebab skewers.
- Life‘s Greatest Miracle—Identify the effects of maternal consumption of alcohol at various stages of pregnancy.
- World in the Balance—Calculate how long it takes a country’s population to double in size and investigate factors affecting growth rate.
What do you think? Have you used one of these resources before in your classroom? Or are we missing your favorite resource? Let us know!
By Rachel Connolly on January 26, 2011 11:33 AM |
When NASA selected the first civilian to travel into space, it wasn’t a rock star or a journalist—it was a teacher. January 28, 2011 is the 25th anniversary of the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster, when seven explorers lost their lives doing something that they believed in. On January 28, 1986, I was a sixth grade student, and I’ll never forget the immediate silence that fell over my middle school cafeteria when the principal announced the event over the PA system during lunch. We all filed back to our classrooms to watch the television coverage for the rest of the school day.
Christa’s Portrait — Image from NASA
That event solidified in me what had been a growing desire that began when I was four years old and watched Carl Sagan champion the need to explore the stars in his Cosmos series. Ten years after Challenger, I graduated from college with a degree in Physics and Astronomy and took my first job teaching high school in the Bronx. I learned more science that first year of teaching, and found more inspiration trying to help my students’ explore their own questions, than I had ever considered possible.
In the wake of September 11, 2001, NASA reached out to New York City students and offered 52 student experiment modules that would travel on a Space Shuttle mission. I found myself working with a group of NYC middle school students to help them develop their own collection of experiments that we would pack and send off to be launched into space. The Space Shuttle became our classroom. As we watched the Space Shuttle carry our experiments into orbit on January 16, 2003, I finally felt like I was playing a small role in space exploration. This was mission STS-107, and it tragically would be the last flight of the Space Shuttle Columbia, which disintegrated on reentry into the atmosphere, killing all seven crew members.
STS-107 Crew ©NASA
As I faced the loss of another Space Shuttle, I found myself on the other side of sixth grade. Now responsible for helping a large group of sixth graders try to understand the enormity of what had happened, I reconnected with my Challenger experience. I found new inspiration in the words of Christa McAuliffe, a teacher from Concord, NH who was one of the seven crew members lost on Challenger—“I touch the future. I teach.”
