H2ome: Energy wizards

Abstract

The aim of this project is to increase the interest of high school students in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) subjects by developing a toolkit and helping the teachers explain these difficult subjects. STEM subjects are often hard to understand for students because teachers do not have the appropriate resources to explain these subjects in a simple way. Considering this and the increasing awareness of global warming, the Flemish government commissioned us to develop a product that will make students more aware of renewable energy and its use in modern society. We aim to achieve this by developing an educational toolkit and workshop that utilises water energy, for fourth, fifth and sixth grade ASO (General Secondary Education Schools) and TSO (Technical Secondary Education Schools Students) students. The toolkits will use the theme of home and will contain several experiments that fit into the Flemish government’s physics curriculum for each grade. This report shows our process, starting with an introduction of our team and the project. Furthermore, we describe our market research about hydropower plants/ turbines, existing toys/ toolkits, our users/stakeholders and the Flemish government’s curriculum for secondary school physics classes. Finally we give more information about the prototyping, the experiments carried out in our workshop and the conclusions.