Easy Energy field trips: To go boldly where no one (or child) has gone before….
Unless your school is next to a solar farm, nuclear reactor or gas power station, an energy related field trip might be a challenge. This blog identifies some of the places that you might want to explore with students that are all on your school site to improve their understanding of energy use at school.
Helping your students understand your school’s energy use without perhaps appreciating where most of the energy is consumed on site can mean students find it hard to piece together the whole energy use picture.
For example a student looking at a graph of high gas use but not actually knowing that the school uses gas for its heating can be one barrier to learning. Equally, even if your students are the best at turning off the lights in the classroom, they may still see high energy use created by an appliance that they’re not aware of.
Some areas of school can’t be freely accessed by students. Even though my parents were teachers, the novelty of stepping into the staffroom or photocopier office was still exciting at my own schools as a child. This might be a chance to generate a sense of excitement and discovery but without going beyond the school gates (and as a bonus….. no consent forms to be completed and no transport to arrange!).
So this summer, if you have some more time available, I’d encourage you to get out of the classroom and do a bit of an energy use investigation. Our energy audit activity can be completed to support this, but it can be as simple as just discovering and identifying the other parts of the school and the appliances and equipment that are consuming the most energy.
Warning at the outset, do not do this without notifying those staff you may visit unless you want the smallest portions for eternity from your catering team as a consequence of springing a surprise visit on them just as they’re starting lunch preparation. If you can, check if non-teaching staff would be happy to be interviewed by pupils about their daily routine focused on energy use.
“Itinerary”
- Find the site manager or caretaker and get a tour of the boiler room, find the heating controls or building management system and see if you can find the meter readings. Bonus: if your school has solar PV, can you find the inverter that converts solar energy to the energy you can use in school and the meter to show solar energy generated.
- Venture into the office/ photocopier room and do a quick energy audit of the different appliances used. What appliances are there? How many printers are turned on? Who is responsible for turning these off at the end of the day or in the holidays?
- If you have a server room and/or computer room, count how many different pieces of electrical equipment there are (computers, screens, servers etc.). If there is air conditioning, can you see how it is controlled and what temperature it’s set to? Talk about the reasons air conditioning might be needed. Top tip: you can save a lot of energy by changing the set temperature on air conditioning, server rooms do not have to feel like fridges.
- Discover the depths of the kitchens. How many freezers are in use? E.g. are there two, both half full and could the contents be consolidated into one, with one turned off? When are ovens turned on/off? Does your school have a cold lunch day?
- Explore the wider playground and sports facilities? Looking and counting external lighting – security/astro floodlights.
- Scout out the ‘sacred’ staffroom. Like the office, what appliances might be there that students might not expect. (You may want to do a quick review pre pre-students exploration). Examples that I’ve seen…karaoke machine, micro fridge for emergency beer, multiple chargers plugged in for unknown equipment, disco light, neon sign, an iron, and rechargeable electric flip/flopping fish.
- Tour the technology/laboratory backrooms – what equipment lurks here that may not be on now but when in use, can use a lot of energy. E.g. the infrared light used to hatch the chicken eggs, the 3D printer?
Follow up activities and outputs: Students can use your discoveries to help draw up a holiday switch off list or write up the interviews, and what has been learnt. If you’re trying to find out what uses the most energy, students could use appliance monitors around the school. You can play a great higher or lower game with different appliances. Top tip: for fridges and freezers, plug them in overnight as they switch themselves off and on with temperature.
Other outputs could include a discovery journal with these different spaces re-imagined and written up as mysterious, magical realms that use different amounts of energy, a newspaper report exposing the most significant energy discoveries….like “who is the user of karaoke machine in the school staff room?”, or pupils could generate a simple map of the school, with the route taken and energy discoveries along the way. One of our schools used the boiler room for an imagined trip to space!
Tip: Speak to your geography subject lead/head (as they may have simple maps of the school) to both navigate with and use to annotate/record observations so some cross-curricular learning.
