 Hello and welcome to Energy 101, Kidwind in the SHS Chevy Wolf Project. My name is Dan Whistler and I'm the environmental science teacher at Sterling High School in Sterling, Kansas. And on behalf of my students that are helping with this presentation, it's a privilege for me to welcome you. We hear a lot in education right now about STEM related topics and project-based learning. How do we engage students in learning? I cannot imagine a better topic to have kids studying than energy. This graph from West Star Energy shows the increasing demand and the increasing challenges they have. More people plugging in more appliances. We need more electricity all the time. Give you a great example of that. This last summer I had a chance to travel to Australia with a group of athletes and I joked with all the athletes. It was easy for me to find them in the airport terminals. All I had to do is look for the charging stations. Everybody's plugged in and recharging their smartphones. But it isn't just teenagers. Yes, this young man setting next to the athletes, sucking his thumb in diapers and using a smartphone. It just goes to show that in the years ahead there will be increasing challenges. How do we supply more electricity for more people all the time? As you can see from this graph, there are a number of different ways in the United States that we can produce electricity. Obviously, natural gas and coal are the two biggest resources that we use. These are needed in order to meet base loads and to be able to adjust for peak capacity. But it's actually wind that is the number one growing resource in terms of meeting the increasing demands for electricity. In Kansas, West Star Energy is investing in more and more wind farms all the time, especially in the western half of the state. This map shows the various sites around Kansas and the ways that West Star Energy is generating electricity. Currently in Kansas, we are about three-fourths coal with just four to five percent in terms of wind. But as I mentioned, that number is increasing. It isn't just Kansas, though. This wind farm is actually being installed in Maine. I had a chance to tour it two years ago when I received training through Kidwind. It's another example of why students around the United States can benefit from learning and using the hands-on wind energy activities in the classroom. Before school started, I had a chance to work with Audra Reed and Kim Haranadel in Manaliment Free School with their sixth grade students. Here's an example of the acitlement students have working with wind. To see how our students were doing with oil, how have your students responded to these hands-on activities. Kim replied, I had determined at the beginning of this project that I would only be using it the first four weeks of school. Just enough time to build a quick model, do some comparisons, and create some volts of electricity and move on so as not to reach the point in which students were no longer engaged in the project. We are now in our ninth week of school and the project is still strong, and every day we don't work on them students are begging to do more. They are naturally leading themselves through the different science content with the Kidwind project as a base to their scientific inquisitions, hypotheses, and discoveries to solve real-world problems while learning the curriculum, Kim Heron. I think this is a great example of what it means for the students to truly engage them in the subject and let them do science, not just study science. The topic of energy though doesn't just involve environmental issues, it is most definitely an economic matter as well. I share these guidelines with my students and we talk about how the choices we make do have costs, both environmental costs and economic costs. I took advantage myself of an incentive that was offered through Westar Energy two years ago to have a home energy audit done in my home. This picture here shows a blower test that was done to determine how airtight the home was. They also performed tests, looked at appliances to see how efficient or inefficient they are, the amount of insulation in the attic, all the different things that affect a home's energy usage. They then make recommendations on ways to improve the efficiency of your home. I did a number of the improvements, the recommendations, and now thanks to those in my monthly utility bill down at the bottom you can see I'm noticing the savings. For this month it was approximately 20 kilowatt hours per day. For a month's time that most certainly makes a difference and now thanks to those energy savings I'm paying off the improvements that were done in my home. Taking a closer look at the science involved in the projects I think it's important that in our classrooms we don't just have students study science that we get them doing science and all of the energy conversions are a great way to do that. One of the things we study are the commoners laws of ecology, emphasizing all the connections. Everything must go somewhere. NIMBY, you've probably heard of not in my backyard. Banana is also an interesting concept, built absolutely nothing anywhere near anyone, but then we run into the problem of the cost of transmission lines. Yes, there's no such thing as a free lunch, there will be costs involved. This meter comparator is a great example of a way to use in the classroom the showing the inefficiencies of the incandescent bulbs as compared to the newer LED bulbs. This example here is a lab I have students do in my classroom, they are using what I refer to as a kilowatt hour power strip. There are 10 100 watt light bulbs all lit up, so there is a thousand watts of electricity being utilized and in regards to energy conversions, yes, lights being produced, but there is also heat that is being released. This heat, while it's not a campfire, it is enough that yes, these students are roasting marshmallows, it's not quite the same atmosphere, but it is possible in the classroom, yes, we made s'mores using this light strip. It's a great example again of showing energy conversions. Going beyond this energy conversions lab of making the s'mores and having fun with that, I really want to get students involved in doing science, actually performing experiments, doing the data collection, using the scientific method. This is where I really like the kid wind activities and in particular the advanced wind turbine kit. This turbine can be put in front of a single fan and then you can do all the data collection with it. Again, scientific method, change one variable at a time. One of the things I can tell you, yes, as a science teacher, I know what budgets are like. And this is where I would emphasize, there are opportunities, there are ways, there are organizations out there that support you as a classroom teacher. This is an example I received through the Sierra Club, a $1,000 grant that I've been able to use for wind energy activities in my classroom and we also purchased some kits that I have been able to share with other teachers at kid wind workshops at discounted prices to help them get started with wind energy activities in their classes. I was fortunate thanks to the support of the Rice County Energy Coalition two years ago to attend a week-long training with kid wind in Maine. Again, if there are activities that you would like to be a part of, feel like they would help your students in your classroom, don't just have an idea, actually make a plan, put it into action, share it with other people, that's what I've done with kid wind activities in my classroom and now the students are getting to do the hands-on activities. These are examples of the actual turbines in use in my classroom and several of the students have worked to put together a video to show you the hands-on activities and how the data can then be put into Microsoft Excel spreadsheets and take the data then to put it into visual form. Here's that video. We're going to do an experiment before you guys, we're going to start with two blades and then go to four blades and then wind up with six blades and they're all the same right here. We're going to start out by doing all of our blades at the same pitch, which is 20 degrees. You see right there, both blades are set at the pitch of 20 degrees and when we add blades, add two more and then eventually four more, they'll all be set at the same pitch. This here is our voltmeter telling us how much voltage is being created by the turbine as the blades are being spun. It has a 10 volt so it can measure up to 10 volts or it can be set to 5 and measure up to 5 volts. Our turbine puts out more than 5 volts so we have to run it on the 10 volt meter measurement. That's also hooked up to our generator back here underneath the big pulley running the generator and then it runs out to the turbine. Okay, we're going to run our fan on high. We'll run a test here with the two blades, we'll do four blades and we'll go on to six blades and we'll put our data into the spreadsheet. Full speed, as you can see, it's almost putting out 8 volts. This is a 20 degree pitch and it's also around a 20 degree pitch. If you can see on this, it's putting out almost 10 volts. Also set a 20 degree pitch. Lastly, we're on to our six-blade model. Still set a 20 degree. This is another kind of meter. We also used to measure the volt output of the turbine. This is called a digital volt meter. You can measure in amps and volts too. This one says we're putting out almost 9 volts of electricity. This is the spreadsheet where I recorded the data that we collected during our experiment. First I put the number of blades, the volts produced, and the pitch which we left at 20 degrees the entire time. This is the chart I made from the spreadsheet I created. The orange boxes show the blade number and the green boxes show the volts produced. The volts produced rises as the... Now if you'd like to take the learning the students have done in your classroom with the wind energy activities and then take it a step further to challenge them, I would encourage you to have them register and compete in an area kid wind challenge. In the kid wind challenge, students take the turbines that they have designed in your classroom. Again the goal produces much electricity as possible. So using the scientific method, test various blade designs, number of blades, the pitch of the blades, even the gear ratio of the turbines, and design one to produce as much electricity as they can. These turbines are then placed in front of four high speed fans in a wind tunnel and hooked to a laptop using veneer software. In addition to the energy production, students will also give a presentation to judges either in a video, a trifold display board. In some manner they will share with the judges what they have learned through the program. These pictures here are from the Kansas State Kid Wind Challenge held at Kansas State University last spring. As part of this program, it's always interesting to display the results on the wall as the turbines are being tested in the wind tunnel. I guarantee as students watch their turbines in action in the wind tunnel, you could not produce this kind of excitement using a lesson out of the textbook. It is always fun, as I said, to watch the students as they see their turbines being tested in the results displayed live. Kid Wind has taken the Kid Wind Challenge one step further themselves this year and for the first time in April of 2014, Kid Wind will be hosting a national Kid Wind Challenge. Held in Washington, D.C., this will give the state winners a chance to compete on a national level. To learn more about this, you can go to learn.kidwind.org. Beginning in January of 2011, students at Sterling High School have been involved in a very unique project-based learning experience. This STEM-related study, the SHS Chevy Volt Project, came about as a result of a comment a student made in my class. I had given them a hypothetical assignment. I have a 40-mile commute every day, live 20 miles from school, and when I first started hearing about the Volt, gave the students an assignment to research and find out more about it. One of the students threw out the idea that it would really be neat if we could get one and test it. Thanks to local company Jcam, our major sponsor of this project, and a number of other businesses in the area, the SHS Chevy Volt Project became a reality. We now have, as a school district vehicle, have leased a Chevy Volt for three years. I have installed a 240-volt charging station in my garage at home and have it metered so we know exactly how many kilowatt hours of electricity are being used on a daily basis to charge the Volt. Likewise, thanks to AAE, have received a grant to install a 240-volt charging station at school, and it is also metered. Now the EPA fuel label shows that we should get 35 to 38 miles per gallon when it is on the generator, and 94 miles per gallon equivalent when the Volt is running on the electricity that is stored in the battery. On a daily basis, we were able to use the onboard computer to record all of this data. The electric miles, the gas miles, how many kilowatt hours are used, the number of gallons of gas, all of this goes into weekly spreadsheets, and we are then able to take those spreadsheets and look at the data. From an economic standpoint, the Volt, there is a huge difference in terms of daily energy use. Electric miles are averaging about 4 cents per mile when running on the battery, and with gas it is running about 10 to 12 cents with running on the generator. We have shared our results a number of different ways, and it has been interesting as students see information on the Volt to look at the bias that is involved in some situations. Our data is actually able to use, we almost have two years of data now, and we can take this data and compare it with results of other companies, other studies. This is the Australian High School Picture Slide Show by Aubrey Lane, Jed, and Ryan. This year our teacher, Mr. Whistler, decided he wanted to get a Chevy Volt. The reasons for getting one are many. One of the reasons for getting a Volt is because we live in Kansas. In Kansas you have to drive a long ways to get somewhere. There is a lot of open space. If we would have got a leaf or a hybrid, we would probably be walking a lot or calling someone to get us. For example, Mr. Whistler, who drives the Volt to school, has a round trip of 40.6 miles. One time he was about a mile from home and his charge ran out. If he was driving a totally electric car, he would be pushing his car, but with the Volt, he just automatically switches over to gas to get him own comfort ready. In our calculations in class, we find that the Volt does in fact work and it saves you money in operational costs, which means it may be kind of pricey now, but in the long run it will save you money. We look at things like kilowatts used, electric miles when in the AM and PM hours, gas miles driven, and we pick out things that are more significant. The Volt has been getting about 35 to 40 miles on a charge, which in this economy that is really good. The Volt is getting fortunes per mile while a gas car is getting around 33 cents per mile. So you might be wondering, what will we be doing with this project in the next two to three years? We plan to take the Volt to the Kansas State Fair to show it off and answer questions people might have about it. There's a lot of false information out there about the Volt, so it's important to get the right information to people. Fox News, for example, was bashing the Volt when it first came out, but recently they have been saying how it's such a good car. We would like to keep the Volt for a long time, so we could keep getting good information and portraying the truth to other people owning or looking to get a car. We went into this project with an open mind about the Volt, and now that we have the facts and statistics, we find that the Volt does save you money. One of the questions we often get as it relates to our study of the Volt is, does the Volt really reduce carbon dioxide emissions? And the answer based on our data is yes. Even though Kansas is generating or West Star Energy is generating three-fourths of its electricity with coal, using the 1.7 pounds per kilowatt hour number from West Star, we are able to show that our Volt has reduced carbon dioxide emissions by almost 40%. Again, as it relates to student learning, there's a lot of different ways that students can show what they're learning. Here are two advanced students that were actually giving a presentation to area superintendents at SDAC, and recently I had a chance last spring to have a student that was involved in a Skype conversation with a Peace Corps officer and an educator located in Armenia. It's fun to allow students to show what they're learning in lots of ways beyond just taking a test. With this project, again, the students and I thank you for your patience. This has been the first opportunity for us to share our results online. It's been a learning experience for us, and we hope that you have learned a lot through our presentation as well. Thank you, and best wishes for a great school year.