What we're doing at Eastern today is a teacher training around wind energy.

It's part of a larger project in Grant and Mineral counties to sort of bring wind energy education down to the K-12 level.

This is funded by a grant from Toyota who is very interested.

They buy all the wind electrons from the wind farms up in this area to power their facilities in southern West Virginia.

We've got about ten teachers today up here, and we'll come back in the fall and do a bunch more training and a bunch more schools.

wind and also solar tech programs are some of the fastest growing jobs across the country.

And so in KidWind, we're essentially hoping to bring that knowledge base, that awareness of these clean energy opportunities for long term employment down into the lower grades, just to broaden the understanding of the opportunities that exist out there within the clean energy space.

and KidWind was born about 20 years when I was teaching in sixth grade and I had done a lot of solar with my kids and I went to go find some stuff and wind energy and I found nothing.

So we started develop our own tools and equipment and we started doing my kids And I got a teacher fellowship to develop it all out.

And it turned into an accidental career for the last 20 years, to be perfectly honest with you.

I would say that our growth has been pretty crazy in the last ten years.

We're in probably every state in the United States.

I have 500 trainers around the United States and we have thousands upon thousands of kids doing wind energy and other renewables at many different levels all across the United States.

really here because we were here first, not because we were smarter.

We just did it earlier.

we used to manufacture all our own equipment.

Like a lot of the equipment you're going to see up there, I invented and we had a multimillion dollar business, but I did not like running a warehouse and stuff.

So I sold that to another company just to focus on the teacher development side.

and how we know they're getting better is we kind of continually have to make the challenges more complex, more interesting, because they're just getting a lot smarter and they're getting a lot more creative.

So we kind of like have to stay ahead of them.

(Michael laughs) So like we have every year we have a national one challenge where like 700 kids show from all these events around the States and each year they just kind of continue to like invent the craziest things they're using like 3D printers, laser cutters, CAD design.

They're going like crazy.

I don't think we do anything radically different than what we did 20 years ago.

We have a lot more curriculum, we have a lot more materials and kits that we've developed over time.

But the core of it doesn't look a whole lot different than what we were doing 20 years ago.

I feel like the class actually did prepare me quite a bit for what I would do in the field.

The class kind of teaches you the terminology and the theory, and then you can kind of apply the practical parts of it when you actually are working in the field.

So as science teachers, you're always looking to create spaces where your kids can explore open ended topics.

Wind energy tends to be- and by accident I discovered this- a space where there's kind of never-ending amounts of complexity.

But you can also do really simple things like the thing we were doing this morning with MacGyver Wind like popsicle sticks and paper.

I can build a wind turbine.

I can do some very complicated things with college kids, and it scales like crazy.

That means kids can continue to explore and explore kind of as they are kind of going through the process.

So KidWind taught me a lot about wind.

and wind as energy.

matching the wind to the conversion to electricity was something that I learned.

I had no idea what a generator was.

I built a generator at the KidWind program.

I took one home with me and I will have my students now building a generator.

It's about creating those spaces.

It's also to why we get teachers involved is it helps them teach the content matter.

They have to teach like the science standards, the technology standards, so it helps them do their job just in a new and interesting way.

So, electricity and where we get our electricity from is kind of this black box that most people don't understand and most science teachers are pretty interested.

So when you start to open up that box, they get pretty interested in how that system works and then especially how wind or solar or other systems plug in to that system.

So they're- science teachers are naturally curious.

If you open it up a little bit for them, they're going to stay curious.

And then the other key is activities.

We spend a lot of time developing activities that are very engaging hands-on, that they're going to want to do in their classrooms.

We're not going to give you 2 hours of PowerPoint.

We're not going to do that kind of stuff.

So we're we're giving them activity.

We know work, we've tested them.

Our model of the way we run the organization is very decentralized.

Like we, we kind of generate a lot of content.

A lot of it's open source, meaning anybody- is all free to download off the site.

So that helps.

Teachers are notoriously underfunded.

I get $400 a year to pay for all the supplies for chemistry, physics, physical science, AP biology.

It's...Yesterday, I was given three turbines to take home to my classroom, and the teacher next door to me got three also.

So now we have six turbines that we can both borrow from each other to do labs.

So it's it is the free stuff that I'm actually making the effort for as well as the education, because we're not funded well, we're just not.

With the resources from Toyota we can now do to the next step.

So these teachers will get an email that says, Hey, you saw some cool stuff the last two days, I have some money.

We can buy you some equipment to do that in your classroom.

Then we'll get them all the materials.

Then if they do it and they write up, say, a half a page paper, we're going to pay them.

Because I'm a big believer that you have to pay teachers for their time to integrate new content.

and then we'll come back later, do additional training and continue to build their knowledge.

So a lot about teacher training and teacher uptake is like sustained support.

You can't just come in for a day, do it, then walk away.

It's going to be like a two year process where we continue to like, improve their knowledge and skill sets and things like that to.

A big report came out from the feds.

It was called the Wind Vision Report.

Their study came out and said, we have all this technology, we just don't have- We're not going to have the employees.

For ten years, we're saying, 'yes'.

And there's a lot of research like where does workforce begin?

Does it begin when you're in college?

When do you want to do the thing you want to do?

And there's a lot of research shows like fifth to seventh grade, you need to lay the seeds that these careers exist.

So we've been like harping about this for a long time.

We are now at a moment where we need so many employees in these fields.

We didn't do our homework and it's going to be a big problem right now.

What's happening is I'm getting more money than I've ever raised in my life because they're like, we need workers, we need workers!

Well, they're sitting in fifth grade.

They're sitting in seventh grade.

Yeah, we can take some high schoolers and turn them into workers, but this is a long term problem.

So I would say now we have the resources, but it's going to take time.

And if we don't do it, we're just not going to have like we are right now- the offshore wind industry.

United States is like...wants to be very big.

Most of those workers, are now going to be imported from Europe or we're going to send them to Europe to get trained.

We have not built that industry and these are ten year long processes.

So we're reaping a little bit of that problem right now.

if we don't do it, we just won't have the bodies to work in these industries.

And the other big thing in these industries, like utilities or electrical, is a lot of the people in them are kind of retiring.

They're getting older.

So it's- you have two problems, you don't have enough workers, and the ones who know what's going on are getting out of the business.

So it's a pretty big issue.

So we're already there.

So we got to work on it harder.

But we do have a lot of anecdotal stories nowadays.

I have lots of them in my files, like, Hey, I went, I learned about KidWind or KidWind Challenge and now I'm in college and I'm going to be a wind engineer.

I'm going to work in the wind industry.

So we have like lots and lots of anecdotal stories.

Those are very rewarding.

The most rewarding part of the job for me is this I like hanging out with teachers and training them and helping them understand how to bring it into their classrooms and customizing it for their spaces.