September 2008 — News
Print this article | Email this articleClick here to receive your FREE subscription to T.H.E. Journal
Solar Power Fuels Science at Ruben Salazar Bilingual Education Center
|
|
Gerard Kovach had a simple goal: to teach his bilingual students the concepts of solar energy. The major obstacle: a lack of funds at his school for teaching materials.
Kovach teaches sixth-, seventh-, and eighth-grade science classes at Chicago-based Ruben Salazar Bilingual Education Center. The school has about 400 students, most from families in lower income brackets.
His idea, taken from a course he'd attended at Chicago's Adler Planetarium, was to let the kids team up to build model-sized solar-powered race cars. Along the way, they'd learn about climate change (some classes would watch the Al Gore film An Inconvenient Truth), alternative sources of power, how light and solar photovoltaic cells work, and how to apply scientific methods. He'd used a similar curriculum in science classes at a former school. But this time, with a reduced science budget, he needed to figure out how to buy the kits, which cost $24.95 apiece, from SolarWorld Co.
"I wanted 30 of [the kits]," said Kovach, "because I wanted to do a project with all three classes."
So Kovach submitted a proposal to DonorsChoose.org, a site that matches classroom needs submitted by public school teachers with people willing to fund them. Within a couple of weeks, the proposal had accumulated the $860 that he needed to obtain the kits from the organization, which does the ordering and ships the materials to the recipient. "I thought I hit the jackpot," he said. "That was a lot of money our class was asking for."
Tapping Student Ingenuity
The kits include a solar cell, a motor, and a plastic car body that snaps together. The students worked in groups of three or four to build the cars and design experiments. "They may experiment with what the effects are of adding foil to the solar cars," said Kovach. "They may do experiments to come up with what would happen if we painted the cars different colors. How would that affect the absorption of light and the performance of the car? What happens if we raise the angle of incline of the PV panels?" The expected result: Students would gain a better understanding of basic scientific methods, particularly developing a hypothesis, then testing it.
