Clean Energy Hawaii STEM --- iPad App

http://bit.ly/CleanEnergyHawaii Clean Energy Hawaii STEM is an iPad App created to support innovative energy science education worldwide. This App can be used by teachers, parents, and students in the classroom or at home to augment a science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) curriculum. The term clean energy refers to creating electricity from sources that are renewable or that create little or no pollution during production. The activities within the App facilitate scientific inquiry on renewable energy topics by way of interactive experiences that leverage the iPad functionality. Hawaii is used as a portal to all information and activities in part because the App development team resides here and in part because the Hawaii Clean Energy Initiative's goal is one of the most ambitious in the United States to date: 70% Clean Energy by 2030.

The App starts with a fully touchable view of all the islands in Hawaii. It allows students to see what types of clean energy including biomass, geothermal, hydroelectric, solar, and wind are available on each island. A detailed description for each energy type is available. Students can explore and learn about the energy mix and the legend of each island. Touchable icons show all the types of clean energy and their general locations with each providing detailed information on the energy site. Where available, photos, videos, and web links are included. Additionally, two activities and links to related projects are shown. The first activity is always tied to the specific type of energy. The second is randomly selected to make it more exciting for the students.

Seven unique activities are included to inspire STEM exploration and inquiry: 1) Tap into the heat of the earth to generate power (Geothermal Plant), 2) Use agricultural byproducts to generate power (Electric Biomass), 3) Build a custom wind farm (Wind Farm), 4) Generate electricity from stream flow (Stream Hydro Power), 5) Tilt your iPad to the sun as if it were a photovoltaic (PV) solar panel (Solar Panel Tilt), 6) Discover how one PV system can perform around the world (Peak Sun Hours), 7) Build a PV solar farm (Cloud Challenge).

For five of the activities, students have the ability to use the scientific inquiry process to pose a question; develop a hypothesis; identify control, independent, and dependent variables; formulate a conclusion, and then pose further questions. For these activities, students can collect up to 10 data points, by changing several variables. The data along with the student's scientific inquiry answers can be emailed to a teacher or sent to an iPad compatible printer. For one of the activities, we simulate a 40 watt photovoltaic (PV) solar cell. Here the students are asked to figure out the best way to position the panel for their actual location and for selected locations around the world. For the last activity, students are quizzed on peak sun hours and power output for a typical 3.5 KW PV home solar system for locations around the world.

Category:

Education

Tags:

• Clean
• Energy
• Renewable
• iPhone
• App
• Hawaii
• Solar
• Wind
• Classroom
• Teacher
• instructions
• software
• tutorial