Objective
To give students a fun and interesting way to explore the ideas around energy use and conservation
Things to Keep in Mind
This lesson is a great hands-on way to talk about energy while helping students develop skills as leaders and mediators. It can be adapted in many ways, but as a ‘role playing’ situation, it is useful in modeling what happens between consumers and those who bring goods and services to them.
Materials
“Energy widgets” or whatever else you want to call them – these items should be small. They can be brightly colored or simple, it doesn’t matter, as long as they are small enough to hide in the classroom. You should have a good supply of them (100-200) and it helps if they are of a uniform size and shape.
Asking Questions: Lead-In
Before showing students the widgets, start by talking about how households use energy. Then widen the discussion to how that energy is provided. This is where any visual statistics come in handy: show details of government research or other studies about how energy is supplied and consumed nation-wide. This doesn’t have to be high-level information, as the activity will ask for students to generalize about energy use.
Project: Going Mining
First, break students up into three (or more) separate groups. The first group will be ‘miners’: they will be in charge of finding the widgets that are hidden in various places around the classroom.
The second group, ‘management’, will be responsible for counting the widgets and keeping track of how much energy the ‘agency’ has at its disposal at any one time.
The third group will be ‘consumers’, who will be responsible to tally their (imaginary) energy use, and ask the second group for more resources as necessary.
Explain to students the roles of each of their groups. Assign an ‘energy value’ to each widget. Make the energy value high enough that several of these widgets will last the consumer group a ‘day’ or so. Each ‘day’ can consist of one ten-minute period where miners get widgets, and consumers make up numbers for their daily energy use.
‘Day’ Sessions
In each ‘day’, miners will report what they have found. Widgets will be counted by management and ‘sold’ to consumers. Consumers will detail how much energy they used and report their ‘energy balance’.
Things to Keep in Mind
First, you may find that everyone will want to be miners – find a fair way to create groups, staggering the groups and doing the activity multiple times if necessary.
Another issue is that the consumer group will find it hard to come up with ‘energy balances’ based on vague ideas about how much energy households consume. The teacher can be instrumental is helping the group come up with benchmarks they can use throughout the exercise.
Results and Follow Up
At the end of a certain amount of ‘days’, re-convene the entire class and talk about what happened. Were the ‘managers’ able to deliver the energy that the ‘consumers’ needed? Why or why not? In talking about the challenges and difficulties of the situation, explore the idea of renewable versus non-renewable energy and help students realize that selling non-renewable energy has its specific problems related to acquiring finite resources. The discussion that can come out of this visual, hands-on activity can be very valuable in changing how students think about energy production and use.
|
