For the past couple of months in science we have been learning about Energy which has been our grade 10 physics unit. At the same time in math we were learning about linear equations and graphs which we incorporate both into one big unit project.
Once we were introduced into this unit we created a mind map of what we already knew about energy. My mind map mostly included different types of energy I remember learning about in previous years. Here is my mind map:
We also created a mind map at the end of the unit to show our learning throughout our classes. I’ll show this mind map later on in this blog post
After kind of having a basic idea of what everyone knew about energy we started learning a little more in depth about renewable energy and generators. One of the examples of a generator that we looked at in class was a gravity light which I found very interesting especially how it was used to help people in developing countries. This is the video we watched:
We then went onto learn about our unit project which was to create a generator to capture renewable energy. As this was a group project my group members and I started off by researching different types of generators to give us some ideas and inspiration for our project. Reid, Ethan and Sydney were my group members for this project.
Along the way during the brainstorm process of the project we went on a field trip to Stave Falls Visitor Centre to learn a little more about renewable energy. This was a pretty cool field trip where we also got to see a Tesla coil demonstration and learn about this renewable energy in an interactive way. This field school definitely helped me and my group members better understand that project and how renewable energy works.
My group decided that we were going to build a waterwheel for this project by taking advantage of the creek close to my house and creating energy from that. After doing a bunch of research we created a mini water wheel using bottle caps as a prototype. This worked well but was too small to generate as much energy as we wanted for the project as we wanted to be able to power a couple LED lights. We then continues to brainstorm and came up with the idea of creating a waterwheel out of planks of wood which would look like this:
This was a good idea but didn’t quite work how we intended as it was quite hard to build so we decided to try another ideas using some of the materials we had. We came up with a prototype that was made out of PVC piping, solo cups, a plastic container and a hand crank generator. Although this generator was a good overall idea, it didn’t quite work as intended as she. The cups filled up with water they were too heavy to turn the wheel.
We then had to go back to the drawing board and brainstorm other ideas to create a solution to some of the problems we had in the prototype of the generator. One of the main things we changed was the length between the plastic container we used and the cups, instead of having them directly attached we added some pieces of wood to make the cups farther away. We also cut the cups in half to make the waterwheel more efficient. Another change we made was we made the PVC piping shorted to make the generator more stable when placed in the stream. Although it took many revisions to get to our final draft of our generator, overall I think it work pretty well even though there are definitely somethings I would change when creating another draft. For one thing I would probably add two extra cups to the machine to have a more efficient and effective generator.
Final draft
Once we created our final draft of our generator we created a video to advertise our generator and how it works. In this video we also included the water wheel lighting up LED lights and the power capabilities and energy production. This is our advertisement video:
https://youtu.be/g07osiGFfxg
Another big part of the advertisement video was to create linear equations and graph of the energy production of our generator. Our group created four different graphs, one representing the highest energy production, Lower energy production, comparison to a solar panel energy production we tested and how long it would take for our generator to charge an iPhone.
Leading up to create these linear graphs we did a mini math project on linear equations. The linear equations were used to predict what would happen to a body of water. For my project I decided to do it on the evaporation rates of the Salton Sea as well as the increased salinity levels. This is the mini presentation I made about the Salton Sea:
After completing this project I learned a lot about energy as well as linear equations. One thing that was a big part of this project was definitely the revision process as I learned that your first draft isn’t always going to be perfect. We went through so many different prototypes that every time we would build off of what we did badly and improve upon our mistakes. I think overall my group did really well!
Here is my final mind map:
