It’s back to school time!
We’re gearing up for the beginning of a new school year by setting up our classrooms, organizing our materials, and preparing to implement our new solar panel project.
Our project this year will incorporate solar panels into a greenhouse project that a language arts teacher at our school has started. The solar panels will provide energy to power lighting and heating for greenhouse experiments. As a whole, the greenhouse/solar panel project will provide students with an outdoor facility for the kids to do tests and calculations for math and data analysis.
The students are going to do a lot of the work themselves, so we have to get them up to speed on the math concepts behind the project quickly. Once they are able to do so, they will calculate the energy load for the greenhouses, which will determine the size and quantity of the solar panels we will acquire.
It’s an ambitious project for our students who are, after all, middle school students. But having the goal of the project ahead of them will be a great motivator.
