5 Lessons Learned from year one of Green Tech

• Set up Green Tech activities as team competitions
• Present Green Tech as a series of problems to solve - rather than activities to complete.
• Give students opportunity to fail and try again.
• Encourage students to document their learning as Mouse Squad Blog posts.
• Let students identify new problems they want to solve and find a public venue for them present their solutions.

Green Tech Grows Student Innovators at Baruch 

At first, my Tech Team (our Mouse Squad’s name) students were just following the Green Tech steps. They watched the videos and read the instructions. They wrapped the copper wire around the film canister a thousand times. The shook the canister to make the LED light up. They had fun.

“I liked how the activities...were really hands on...” wrote one student in his follow-up blog post after the DIY Generator activity. “I learned about how we can generate electricity by shaking around a strong magnet inside of a film canister.”

The students were engaged, working as a team and learning. When I signed on to work on the Solar One/Green Tech project, this is what I expected. I expected hands on activities. I expected my students to gain awareness about fossil fuels and global warming. I expected them to be more proactive about turning off lights and equipment. I thought they would make some posters and install some timers on our tech equipment to reduce our school’s electricity consumption.

My expectations were met -- and then exceeded in a really unexpected way. Somewhere in the middle of the Green Tech curriculum, my student started innovating.

I noticed a shift in thinking in the Testing Turbine activity. It asked the teams to generate as much electricity from wind power as they could. How? They had to figure that out.

“Once [our first] design hadn’t been successful, we decided to change the material,” blogged one student. “I learned that the electricity was generated through the spinning motion of the blades...” wrote another. “[And] although my group’s blades were quite small, we generated the most electricity out of the whole class so, we found out that size isn’t really everything.”

The problem they were trying to solve was given to them, and their materials were limited, but the students learned from failures and tried again, spurred on by competition and genuine curiosity.

In the Battery Builder lesson where students were asked to create batteries out of everyday objects, the students started asking questions beyond the scope of the project. One team member reflected on the activity: “Our “battery” was able to generate around .6 volts of electricity, but we took it a step further and combined our battery with the other groups’ batteries. Together we were able to generate around 1 - 1.3 volts of electricity... It really makes me wonder if there was some way to generate lots of electricity with very little materials.”

In the Solarize It activity, the students managed to cause their toy’s battery pack to smoke and realized after some testing that the “rechargeable” batteries they were trying to charge with solar energy were already charged. They failed to Solar Hack their toy, but their blog reflections were not focused on their failure.
“I learned how solar power works and how to apply it to everyday technology,” wrote a student. “I learned that it is more eco-friendly to use rechargeable batteries and especially eco friendly to use a solar powered charger because we are using the suns energy to power our devised in this case.” Another student suggested that “our school can...replace all batteries with rechargeable batteries as well as purchasing mini-solar energies which can be used to recharge them.”

Two months later, a group of my students presented “Photon,” a solar powered iPhone charger prototype at Emoti-con and took home a Crowd Favorite Trophy. This wasn’t a Green Tech activity. It was a student generated DIY project. I gave the students time to work, a small budget for supplies, and a place to present their work. But the concept, skills and motivation came from the students. The impact of their work with Green Tech is clear.

So in the end, the biggest benefit of Green Tech for my Tech Team students was not transforming their thinking about alternative energy. They were actually less motivated to save the planet than I expected. The biggest benefit of Green Tech was that my students transformed into problem solvers, empowered to invent and prototype and troubleshoot until they had solutions (that happened also to also be GREEN!).

Catherine Turso is a Social Studies and Technology Teacher at Baruch College Campus High School.