Jeff-4/30/09 Teach-In Reflection

We really prepared for this day of learning, and we were ready to make the class have the best time they could have. And we really did that. Are teach-in turned out to be great. What we did was we explained our topic which was energy efficiency, and we told them that we focused on wind generated energy. We told them how we created the idea, of choosing wind energy, obviously coming from our visits at Bluestreak. We went on to the show them a couple of videos on how some Wind Turbines looked like, like ones in Palm Springs that Laurence got to see. We asked them if any of them have seen them, and they answered : “Yes I’ve seen many in Europe.” That related to one of our questions, “why are there more Wind Turbines in Europe?” Which was answered that there is more wind their. Which is correct. We showed them a really cool video of one Wind Turbine in Denmark actually collapsing. We also showed them the difference between Horizontal and Vertical turbines. They really enjoyed are 15 minute conversation and they were really engaged. Than we went to our “game” which was basically that we made a Wind Turbine and we let them create  their own fans and do different styles and we had a competition on who’s was the fastest/worked the best. They really had a great time doing this. They made all different types of designs and they even colored them to make cool effect when the fan was spinning on the turbine. The way we made it spin, was that it was energized by a fan. The kids had a great time and their reflections turned out to be really good. We had a great 90 minutes prepared for these kids and it worked out to be great. We had a great teach-in! I also want to thank Steve Volkmann for all the help he put into our project, to make it the best. And my group was awesome also.Jeff Banastey