Saving the World While Becoming a Better Teacher: My Joule Fellowship, Week 1

This entire week was one where I “stuffed my brain” full of information!  I learned a lot about all types of green energy initiatives at the UConn Center for Clean Energy Engineering.  I heard about Solar arrays and how the individual solar cells work, I learned about manipulating the atomic structure of solar cells to try and maximize their efficiency - this included a brief foray into making basic solar cells with, get this, POWDERED DONUTS (they have an ingredient in them that can produce electricity when they absorb light - maybe Mom was right, those things might NOT be good for you...).  One of the more interesting topics was about how colonies of microscopic creatures can clean the environment (or make it less clean).  This one requires some explaining...

Most people have heard of bacteria that are used in oil spills.  The bacteria “eats” the oil and turns it into a number of harmless substances.  Well, it turns out that MOST microscopic organisms take in all sorts of NASTY byproducts of human energy usage.  Plants, like algae, use CO₂ to create their own energy, but other microorganisms can take in things like Lead, Nitrogen Oxides (NO_x) and Sulfur Dioxides (SO₂) which are created in burning fossil fuels and create poor air quality (Ozone) and Acid Rain, and can either metabolize (use) them, combine them with other elements to make them less dangerous to the environment, or, in some cases, make them into even NASTIER things.  One of the Joule Fellows is working with an engineer/biologist to map colonies of these microorganisms and determine WHAT they do to WHICH nasty byproducts of human energy production.  That way, they can determine the interactions between these colonies and the environment and, in that way, make better predictions as to how mans’ actions will affect the local (and, perhaps in the future, worldwide) environment based on where these microorganisms exist.  THIS is the ULTIMATE engineering problem - HOW do you design and implement traps to collect these tiny organisms and, once you do THAT, how do you figure out the effects of BILLIONS of them on the environment of the WORLD?  You thought YOU were just one person and could not do anything, but one bacteria can change the world!

The six Joule Fellows this summer are working on important research in the field of clean energy.  This topic has recently been on the minds of many individuals, especially with the price of energy (oil, natural gas, electricity, etc.).  There has been a lot of research going into discovering new sources of oil (getting it from shale, oil sands, etc.), new ways to get the fuel we KNOW about out of the Earth (for example, look up Mountain Top Removal - this is, in my opinion, a very cheap, but HORRIBLE way to get coal...), and making other sources we use more efficient (nuclear - Idaho National Lab supports educators and students in learning about nuclear energy almost every year through their annual Physics Teacher’s Workshop - they were unable to get funding this year, but, if you write to some national legislators, maybe NSF will fund them NEXT summer!).  The Joule Fellowship program is one of these programs where teachers are introduced to ways that clean energy collection can be made more efficiently and cost effective.  From creating cheaper, more efficient solar cells to Battery Energy Storage Systems of the clean energy we’ve collected, to cleaning the environment after more than a century of our misuse using, as HG Wells wrote, in War of the Worlds, “...by the humblest things that God, in his wisdom, has put upon this earth.”  Research that we, as teachers, can bring to countless students in our schools and, hopefully, encourage them to be better stewards of the planet than we or our forebears were.

Programs like INL’s Physics Teacher’s Workshop and the UConn School of Engineering Joule Fellows program work - I’ve seen it firsthand.  This past year, after attending the INL workshop, I introduced nuclear energy into my science curriculum.  It was AMAZING the response I got from my students!  At the start of my unit, about three-fourths of the kids had negative views of nuclear energy and radiation, despite being one of the more efficient and less dangerous sources out there.  In fact, living in New England, much of our own electricity is generated by nuclear power plants.  After running the unit, 90% of the kids had a POSITIVE view of nuclear energy and radiation.  This is something that wouldn’t have happened had INL not allowed me the honor of attending their workshop.

I plan on incorporating my Joule Fellowship into my teaching next year as well.  Every one of these programs has given me a more complete view of the world I inhabit and allowed me to open the eyes of some, if not all, of my students to the wonders of Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM).  I hope that my blogging about them creates more funding for programs like these.  This is because, for every teacher that you engage through one of these STEM programs, you engage most, if not all, of their students.  If even 10% of them become scientists or engineers, that means America, and the WORLD, will have benefitted.  Please support programs like these and, if you know of anyone who teaches, let them know of these programs, as well.  They and their students will thank you for it!

Until next week...