Energizing Student Potential 2018 Benjamin Elementary – Bloomington, Illinois

Our STEM Challenge Our challenge was to make a house of cardstock that would keep the most heat inside it. One of the things we bought with our grant money was a thermal camera. We attached this to our ipad and used it to see where heat was being lost in our houses. Then we could add insulation to the house and retry it.

Our Energy Audit Our energy audit was one of our most fun parts of the project. First we learned about the difference between energy efficiency and conservation as well as conductors and insulators. We also got trained on the tools.

Our Energy Audit Then our custodian, Mr. Bosquez, and our energy auditor helped us measure heat, light, humidity and temperature around the building and showed us parts of the building we never got to see before!

Our Energy Audit We got a laser thermometer with some of our grant money and used it to measure the temperature of anything we pointed it at. That let us find the temperatures in different parts of each room we toured. It was interesting to see how different the temperature could be from one part of the room to another.

After Our Energy Audit . . . We were inspired to find out more about all the ways we use and waste energy. We used our Kill-a-Watt meters to measure how much energy was used by stuff at school and home like appliances and lights. We found out that stuff that gets hot (like the Keurig and the computers) use the most energy.

Spreading the Good News About Saving Energy Once we found out about how much energy we waste, we wanted other people to know about it and stop wasting energy too. So, the next thing we did was write persuasive papers to tell others how to save energy. We shared these at our energy fair.

But We Didn’t Stop There!! We also kept data on the number of cars that pull up in our parent pickup lane each day and calculated how much energy is wasted by cars sitting still but running while parents waited for their kids. Some cars sat outside for 35 minutes and were running the whole time!! We couldn’t believe it! We included this information in our energy fair too! At least our bus drivers turned off the buses while they were waiting!

Energy Experiments

Our Energy Fair We had our energy fair on Tuesday, April 17th. Our Curriculum Director came to hear everything we found out about saving energy in our district, and then we invited parents and younger students to come hear about what we learned. Lots of people said how much we had learned and were impressed by our depth of knowledge.

Our Energy Fair Kids really can make a difference!!

The Energy Celebration After we completed the program, we got to send 13 kids to the Field Museum in Chicago for the end of the project celebration. Over 100 schools attended, and our school was one of 8 chosen by the sponsors to present our project to the whole group!

THANK YOU!!!! We are SO happy that we got to do this project. We learned a lot, and some of us even started to like science more because we were able to do so many experiments, be real scientists, and share what we learned with the world. We couldn’t have done all this without NEED and the super generous sponsors that gave us this chance.