Electricity!!

This week was probably the most exciting and fun week for me. In Mr. Sowder’s science class the students have been learning about various forms of energy. He has a student teacher that was doing a lecture series on renewable energy sources. Seeing that I needed to get more involved with the class, I asked Mrs. Hackett (the student teacher), if I could do a three-day lesson on electricity. She agreed, and I began working on the activity. Basically, I went to how-stuff-works.com and looked up how electricity is generated. I already had a basic understanding from concepts learned in Electricity and Magnetism, but I wanted to get a more general understanding and get ideas for how to present this to the class. After a few hours of research, I put together a power point presentation that captures the essentials of electricity. If I can figure out how, I’ll insert the presentation .

Nonetheless, the idea was to spend day one on discussing the background to electricity. For example, we talked about what is energy, what is electricity, what are electrons, etc. I used lots of pictures and encouraged the students to take notes. Day one went exceptionally well. I think the students were excited to have a new person give a presentation and I tried to keep the class at a high energy level. Due to some technical difficulties, on day two, we went to the computer lab to look at a few interactive pictures on generators. This process was very difficult because moving the students from the classroom to the computer lab and back to the classroom generally costs a lot of time in terms of getting the class settled. Also, on day two the Principal of the school resigned so the students were fairly unsettled already. To put the icing on the cake so to speak, I wasn’t able to use a computer to give my presentation. Fortunately, I remembered most of it and what most of the pictures looked like, so I just used the chalk board and different colored chalk. Once settled, the class seemed to enjoy and understand the day’s lesson. Day three was supposed to be centered on actually building an electricity generator using coils and magnets. Unfortunately, I did not contact the Physics department in time to obtain the material, so the students were assigned with the task of designing their own electricity generation system using a renewable source of energy.

Some of the students used a hamster wheel to turn a coil inside of magnets. Others used steam produced from geothermal energy. There were a wide variety of renewable concepts that the students used to generate electricity. Overall, I was very pleased and felt the students had learned something valuable.

As a side note, on the first day that I was lecturing, the student from Mr. Sowder’s class who I had talked to earlier in the term when he was kicked out of the class made an interesting comment. Toward the end of the period, I mentioned that we would continue this topic tomorrow and some of the students responded emphatically that they would not be there tomorrow. The student who I had spoken with earlier in turn asked me if I would be teaching tomorrow. When I replied, “Yes,” he said, “Well, if you’ll be here tomorrow, I’ll be here tomorrow.” The sentiment of what he said probably does not read as well as he expressed it, but the message that I took away was that he appreciated my efforts and would try to be mentally engaged the following day. This idea touches on what Mr. Sowder told me at the beginning of the year… that if I just keep coming and the students see that I am there to help then they will respond positively.