Educational+Aspect

=Educational Aspect=

Educational Kiosk (EK)
The Educational Kiosk (EK) will model the actual system and can be used in classrooms. Details about the EK are located on its own page in this wiki.

Solar Powered Gadget Charging Station
Just below the Monitoring Panel is a beautiful popular wood table built by Ileana, Sara, and Brian. The bottom shelf contains the battery that is charged from the solar panel. The table contains a small inverter, which is connected to the battery through the Monitoring Panel and produces (a modified) 120Vac from the 12Vdc battery. The inverter output is connected to an outlet strip so students can plug in and charge their gadget -- cell phone, iPod, camera, etc. -- using power from the sun! The inverter also produces 5Vdc at a USB port, so this connection format is available too for charging gadgets. Seniors Teresa Reyes and Grace Gutierrez provided the panel artwork.

Solar Car Rally
The Solar Car construction and Rally was completed in April 2009. The 6th and 12th grade worked together and 8th grade work on their own. We purchased the Dragster from Kelvin. The cars are a little different this year in that they will not carry the solar panel. Instead they carry a "super capacitor" which needs to be charged with a solar panel. The Dragster comes with a 20F super capacitor.

The solar panel is from the Junior Solar Sprint competition and is available from Solar World. Cost is ~$28 each. This panel has good electrical characteristics (3V @ 1A) and is mechanically robust (mounted on foam board -- not glass). Brian tested this panel with the dragster and it works well -- only takes 30s-60s to fully charge the car's capacitor.

Instead of being a drag race, i.e., first to finish wins, we had a rally format. In rally format drivers have to get to a certain point first. We choose the finish line far enough away so that students would have to recharge their car a number of times - just like in the real world.

Survey
Pre- and Post-project Solar Energy surveys have been administered. The same 14-question survey was given before this project began and again at the end of the project in order to measure learning in a controlled fashion. Here is the actual survey document file:. Throughout this project we have been trying to employ the discovery method, that is, allow the student to discover the concept by him or herself. The students were not told exactly what they should know for the survey. Therefore, the results provide a good measure of actual learning. The table below shows the topic and difficulty of each survey question. The charts below show the improvement in number of correct answers from pre-test to post-test.

Number ||~ Question Topic ||~ Difficulty || From an analysis of the results by question, questions 1-3 showed little improvement mostly because many students knew the answer and got these answers correct on the pre-test. Question 11 actually showed a significant (-82%) decrease in number correct, although this is not shown on the chart. The reason is students were never told the information needed to provide a correct response. They did hear an answer to a similar but different question and simply locked on to that answer.
 * ~ Question
 * = 1 ||< Solar Basics ||= 1 ||
 * = 2 ||< Vocabulary ||= 2 ||
 * = 3 ||< Energy ||= 2 ||
 * = 4 ||< Solar Panel Operation ||= 2 ||
 * = 5 ||< Solar Panel Operation ||= 3 ||
 * = 6 ||< Status of Solar Energy ||= 4 ||
 * = 7 ||< Solar Cell Materials ||= 3 ||
 * = 8 ||< Solar Panel Operation ||= 3 ||
 * = 9 ||< Environmental Impacts ||= 2 ||
 * = 10 ||< Solar Panel Operation ||= 3 ||
 * = 11 ||< Solar Thermal ||= 5 ||
 * = 12 ||< Solar/Space Science ||= 4 ||
 * = 13 ||< Solar Thermal ||= 3 ||
 * = 14 ||< Solar Panel Operation ||= 3 ||

From an analysis of the results by grade, the activity with the greatest impact was the NOVA "Saved By The Sun" video, since this video was showed to the 7th and 9th grades only. The 10th and 11th grades had very little solar educational activities, yet still showed some improvement; we suspect this improvement was from experimenting with the Solar Kiosk and just being members of a new solar "community." Some 10th graders also helped install the solar panel. The 6th and 12th grades showed little improvement, despite engaging in the Solar Car Rally. We conclude the Solar Car Rally activity did not significantly contribute to academic learning, which the survey measured. However, we suspect the Solar Car Rally increased student interest, was fun, and increased students' lab skills.