Case Study 9

Fuels for the 21st Century

For many schools, providing their students with hands-on opportunities to investigate possible alternative fuels for motor vehicles and other petrol powered engines can be a daunting task.

Leonard McKeown is the Project Coordinator for an ASISTM project, Fuels for the 21st Century, which involved four primary schools and two secondary schools. Leonard explained that the project produced a resource kit complete with a CD-ROM of suggested activities to make the otherwise daunting task achievable, affordable and, most of all, fun and engaging.

Solar cells, here working off indoor spotlights, can be used to power a variety of items such as a model helicopter.

The Full Story

Main Features of the Project

• Use alternative fuels as an authentic context to augment student learning.
• Teacher Associates (university undergraduates) support teachers to implement the project.
• Teacher professional development to increase teacher confidence in the subject matter and the use of fuel cells, particularly those linked to chemistry experiments.
• Students obtain first-hand quantitative and qualitative data for analysis.
• Creating opportunities for students to develop communication skills and teamwork.

Professional Learning

To facilitate initial discussions and develop subsequent activities about alternative energy sources, staff participated in a professional learning workshop.

To help deliver the professional learning workshop, five undergraduates from Griffith University were trained after being successfully interviewed. Their role was to demonstrate and support teachers to construct the various fuel-cell vehicles and ensure that all four vehicles were operational for student demonstrations.

These sessions helped class teachers gain confidence and inspired them to engage with current and future technologies.

A need was identified to provide a real-life context for collecting data that was both credible and useful in monitoring the state of the environment over time. Data collection needed to be authentic and useful to the particular student audience.

Integral to all ASISTM projects is the use of Teacher Associates who work with students and provide a mentoring role. In this project, the Teacher Associates, undergraduates from Griffith University, helped deliver the professional development and later worked with small groups of students implementing the activities in the resource kit alongside the class teachers.

Increased Cluster Collaboration

An additional benefit of the workshops was that collaboration on sharing units of work and resources was established.

Participating primary teachers have reflected on the far-reaching benefits of being able to regularly engage with other staff, especially the secondary science staff, for support, ideas and feedback on the development of any new units of work.

The project has fostered alliances and networks among the schools in the cluster and resulted in effective science pedagogy being introduced far more widely than what previously existed.

Supporting Resources

Once the fuel-cell powered vehicles were created and operational, resource material was developed around their use. Teacher Associates were again consulted to help in designing and creating relevant and engaging activities for the students.

Students were engaged in a variety of activities that looked at the various forms of energy as an integral part of the project. These included kinetic, elastic, mechanical, solar, chemical and thermal. The concept that a wound elastic band would have the

energy to initially propel a vehicle further than a vehicle using a different type of fuel cell was quite intriguing for many students.

In preparation for the development of a CD-ROM to capture all the activities and learnings throughout the project, the Project Coordinator met with the multimedia team from the local TAFE early in the project to discuss the creation and design of an effective resource.

This process was quite complex as it was innovative for both the schools and the TAFE to work collaboratively on this type of task. The final product was well worth the effort and has opened the door for further collaboration that benefits all parties.

The CD-ROM not only provides lesson plans and ideas but it contains filmed footage of the fuel-cell powered vehicles in action. Teachers can clearly see how to use the vehicles in a classroom setting. This footage can also be used as second-hand data to be analysed for those schools that were not able to develop this aspect of the project. Data analysis was a key area of learning that developed through the project.

Mentoring

During the project, secondary school students were linked with students from the primary schools to provide a mentoring role.

To facilitate the mentoring process, students were given the opportunity to actively design and determine the nature of activities. Students had the scope to be creative and support each others’ ideas. This model also allowed for teamwork and communication skills to be developed. Senior chemistry and physics students could also relate their learnings to the younger students via practical and relevant examples.

Students participated in running investigations using cars propelled by various fuel sources. Using a ‘fair test’ set up, where variables are controlled, students compared and evaluated the best fuel source in terms of efficiency and usefulness.

The investigative model proved to be easily modified to provide extension work for self-designed student investigations. The choice of self-propelled cars and fuels provided students with opportunities to develop their own investigations on related topics such as speed, acceleration, and the effect of friction surfaces and inclines.

Major Challenges Faced

• To find robust vehicles, that are easy to use, and yet suitable for different classroom applications.
• To indentify fuel cells that would allow senior chemistry/physics students to explore concepts, and that illustrated appropriate concepts for middle and primary school applications as well.

Achievements

To date, 30 teachers, 500 primary school students and 100 high school students have been involved in the project. This project appealed to male and female students alike.

Further Information

Leonard McKeown

Project Coordinator

Alexander Hills Senior High School

Telephone: (07) 3820 1400

lmcke8@eq.edu.au

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