In The Energy Equation students have now moved into the final module – Fuel the Future. In this module, we turn our sights to the future of energy development and usage, exploring a range of sustainable energy technologies and the types prioritised in South Australia to identify the advantages and disadvantages associated with each. To start the students really thinking deeply about this, Professor Gunther Andersson from Flinders University presented to the students about energy challenges driving current research. Students walked up to Flinders to participate in a university-style presentation that really set the foundation for their focus moving forward.
On Monday and Tuesday Week 5, students engaged in a range of sustainable energy technology experiments to investigate the capabilities of these technologies e.g., wind turbines, hydropower, osmotic energy and biochemical energy. This allowed the students to have a working understanding of how each of the technologies worked to assist them focus on an area of exploration for their last assessment task – the collaborative inquiry.
On Friday Week 5, students also explored the question of not only generating energy but how is it effectively stored?
For the last weeks of this semester, students are deconstructing the question how can energy be more efficiently used in SA? and designing either a scientific investigation or engineered design solution. A big part of this is the test and analyse phase, where students gather data and analyse it in their logbooks, drawing comparisons to real world investigations to form a conclusion about the direction of fuels of the future.
