Kids' discoveries at Vancouver Museum and Telus ScienceWorld workshops parallel, or even exceed, real-worldSustainability scienc

Kids' discoveries at Vancouver Museum and Telus Science
World workshops parallel, or even exceed, real-world
Sustainability science.

Picture this: Wacky-looking scraps of bright metallic
cardboard held together by sticky tape that brought a
stone to nearly 200F in two minutes, using only the
sun. It doesn't look like a conventional solar oven,
more like a science-fiction movie prop. Created, not by
a film-studio artist, but by an 11-year old attending
Vancouver Museum's workshops. Solar ovens have
commercial potential, and, might even reduce forest
fires, if we can convince campers to use them.

This scene was not from a Silicon Valley board room,
where the Tesla electric sports car is nearing final
engineering work: Six gifted young men and one young
woman discuss the merits of various energy sources for
a vehicle of the future. And, just like Popular
Mechanics editors, they decide that the hydrogen
fuel-cell vehicle doesn't isn't as practical as
solar-powered battery vehicle. This group's average age
is probably 12 years, and this scene was actually at
Pinewood Elementary School in Delta. The Tesla electric
car is the first production car created by software and
computer engineers, spurred on by the hit feature
documentary, "Who Killed The Electric Car?"

Here's another example: Wired magazine featured a
light-concentrator based on supercomputer calculations
programmed by math wizards. These math geniuses'
parabolic dishes will allow a solar panel to exceed its
usual performance. Only math post-grad students
equipped with supercomputers can do this and save the
planet, right? Well, here's what happened at the 30
Days of Sustainability event at Telus Science World: A
young boy created a parabolic panel that allowed his
model electric car to run without direct sunlight - it
worked in the shade, and, at a good speed relative to
other solar cars running under a full sun! We named
this parabola, "Marek's Curve", in his honour. You can
probably find Marek's Curve with Google.

Why are we, adults, throwing alkaline batteries away?
Mountain Equipment Coop alleges that small household
batteries cause 50%-70% of heavy metal contamination in
landfills. As any American familiar with the billions
of dollars in the Superfund cleanup will tell you, all
landfills will eventually leak. And that toxic sludge
will bubble up in our children's children's drinking
water, and litigation lawyers will issue class action
writs, decades from now. Adults don't know this, but
scores of pre-teens in Vancouver attending Solar Power
Roadshow's workshops have experimented with everything
from gravity to freezing temperatures to revive
single-use batteries. Students who succeeded in
bringing used batteries back to 1.5 volts have shared
their methods to others. Vancouver now has dozens of
potential recycling entrepreneurs, since a new
brand-name alkaline retails for $2 each. More than one
pre-teen vowed to become the 'Bill Gates' of
battery-revival, as there are 12 billion alkalines
disposed of annually. Why not, the raw material costs
nothing, anyway.

Given what has been shown by these kids, I respectfully
suggest, to other educators, to consider allowing
elementary school students to investigate sustainable
energy technology without showing already-existing
'adult world' models because there are useful
discoveries being made by pre-teens, as we've seen in
Solar Power Roadshow's free-form workshops.

Posted by:  
Rob Matthies         
http://sustainablevancouver.blogspot.com

 http://tinyurl.com/s87h8