 Figure 1. Young Scholars and RET teachers visit Burlington Nuclear Lab |
Lisa Leonor Grable, FREEDM Precollege Education Director
Since 2008, middle and high schools in the Alamance-Burlington School System have been partnering with The Science House as part of a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant for an Engineering Research Center led by NC State. The partnership works to answer the question, "how can we study engineering research to bring knowledge of engineering and technological innovation into classrooms in grades 6 through 12?" The FREEDM in FREEDM Systems Center stands for Future Renewable Electric Energy Delivery and Management.
Figure 2. Young Scholars collect data from FREEDM's rooftop solar panels. |
For the past 3 summers teachers and students from Alamance-Burlington participated in programs of the FREEDM Systems Center. Topics included the electric power grid, renewable energy, and electric cars. Teachers in the Research Experience for Teachers program spent time collaborating with graduate students and faculty at NC State working on issues such as improving batteries, using solar power, and communication on the power grid. High school students in the Young Scholars program visited industry sites including the Harris nuclear plant, the coal-fired cogeneration plant in Chapel Hill, and the environmentally sensitive LEED-certified McDonald's in Cary. Middle school students attending a week-long camp at Graham High School studied renewable and non-renewable energy sources, photoelectric effect, solar powered robots, solar panels and daily science-based presentations by students and staff.
Figure 3. RET teachers build electrical devices. |
Resources and information about renewable energy topics are available to all teachers through The Science House website. The Precollege Resources link provides access to energy curriculum projects, science fair resources, and web-based videos that help explain current energy issues. The Science House FREEDM Videos link has five videos produced for the project that highlight the FREEDM research and the career opportunities for students (http://science-house.org/index.php/freedm-videos). These videos are available through NC State's channels on iTunes University or YouTube.
Graduate students from the Center have adopted the Shock Value event for the NC Science Olympiad. They are designing the event for middle and high school regional and state competition.
The programs for teachers and students will be available again to Alamance-Burlington School System teachers and students in June and July of 2012. See The Science House FREEDM website for more information (http://www.science-house.org/freedm/)
Figure 4. Middle school solar robot racing. |
About The Science House
The Science House, an outreach center of the College of Physical and Mathematical Sciences at NC State University, is a national model for the interaction of university science departments and K-12 students and teachers (see www.science-house.org). The Science House has been providing teacher professional development and programming for students in science, mathematics, engineering and technology since 1991. The precollege program for the FREEDM Systems Center is a collaboration between The Science House, the Center for Integrating Research and Learning at the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory at Florida State University, the School of Electrical, Computer and Energy Engineering at Arizona State University, and the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at Missouri University of Science and Technology.
About the FREEDM Center
The FREEDM Systems Center conducts research in the area of green energy and the “smart grid,” including topics such as plug-in cars, rechargeable batteries, solar panels, wind turbines, and communications. The Center began in the fall of 2008 with funding from the National Science Foundation (award number EEC- 0812121). This Engineering Research Center consists of seven universities, with the headquarters at NC State University. More information can be found at freedm.ncsu.edu.
This work by The Science House is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
