Esai LopezBanner ID: 800617779Credits: 2
Completion Objectives (from original Course report):
· Find activities and materials designed for teaching students in grades K-12 about renewable energy, agriculture in arid regions, biomass-derived products, biofuels, and sustainability.
· Sort and annotate materials based on length of time, grade level(s), topics, placement in a curriculum, learning objectives, and modifications to adapt activities to arid regions.
· Coordinate with students and faculty at NMSU and University of Arizona for compiling materials on shared website and attending meetings.
Title: Development of Materials for Teaching Sustainability Using Biomass-Derived Resources
Prior to beginning the research the University of Arizona (UA) began collecting extension education and outreach materials. Their lesson plans were organized and compiled in a spreadsheet. Most of their resources focused on Biology and Earth and Environmental science. The lesson plans and activities come from other Land Grant Universities, National Laboratories and institutions. The objectives of the research was to work with UA Graduate students and continue finding education materials. These objectives were met.
Biomass Magazine, publishes articles and advertisements for the biomass energy industry. The magazines continuously placed an emphasis on, biomass transportation, the transformation of the biomass to feedstock, and increasing the energy yield from the biomass feed. To educate on the state of the biomass industry lesson plans were going to relate to the topics presented in the magazine. The activities found were related primarily tochemistry, water management, and engineering. For students, teachers, and the community to understand theconversion of Guar and Guayule to: natural rubber, resin, bagasse, guar gum, guar meal, and liquid fuels, they need to be able to understand these topics.To date 19 activities have been found.It takes 45-60 minutes to find, fully read through activities, label it with the appropriate New Mexico and Arizona state science standards, and figure out how the lesson can be altered to SBAR objectives. This does not account for time reading activities that are not useful, or reading through Biomass Magazine for topic ideas. The activities we have found are from websites and organizations that collect general science activities. One of the sources, Science Bus, it is an outreach afterschool programin Palo Alto ran by Stanford Undergraduates. Undergraduates work in class rooms doing lessons, activities, and demonstrations afterschool. The Science Bus lesson archives is fifteenyears’ worth of lesson plans. The archive is separated by subject area. Sixty of their activities have been reviewed, finding 13 to be relevant to SBAR. There are still many more to review. Reaching out to other principals and teachers has been placed on hold, until we have more defined goals and information to give to educators.
The future of the research is to find more databases that have lessons on water conservation in arid lands and transportation engineering. Chemistry and traditional engineering activities are not hard to find. Finding activities that pertain to arid and semi-arid land has not been plentiful. Sites with potential for these activities are the websites Cool Australia, Australian National Centre for Public Awareness of Science, John Hopkins Whiting School of Engineering, and the American Society of Civil Engineers. During the upcoming semester teachers and principals will be contacted about participating in SBAR education research.
The excel spread sheet can be found on the shared BOX files.