Energy savers
Energy savers
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Description
Elon Musk's company Tesla invent electric cars to reduce our fossil fuel emissions from transport. Other companies invent devices to reduce energy consumption at home. The challenge for all inventors is to raise money from investors.
This is the context for 'Energy savers'. Students use their knowledge of energy transfers and wasted energy to help an inventor design an energy-saving device, and write the crowd-funding webpage.
Energy savers can be done in 1-2 lessons, to practice higher-order thinking and prepare students for the demands of 'AO3' at GCSE.
Blueprint curriculum links
- Concepts: Energy transfers, Wasted energy
- Skill: Represent with models, Use fractions and percentages.
- Learning stage: Analyse
The lesson resources are delivered as a zip file. After you checkout, you will be sent an email with the link to download them.
Work with a scientist
This activity is ideal for use with a scientist in the classroom, or online. We can help you set up a partnership - just complete the form (only open to UK schools).
Energy savers is a resource developed for the CONNECT project.
Q&A
For the Year 7 Mastery Practice book:
For the Y9/GCSE Mastery Practice Book:
It was written to help year 7 students learn to transfer the scientific knowledge to unfamiliar situation. It can also be used by students in other years to improve their understanding of the fundamental concepts. Learning to apply is what will give students access to the 60% of marks at GCSE that demand more than recalling content. The book uses a research-based approach to teach students how to solve different types of problems.
The Practice Book has a chapter on each unit in the year 7 curriculum, based on a 5-year curriculum and AQA's KS3 Science Syllabus. Download the sample material to see exactly what concepts and types of problems are included.
The first strategy studente need to learn is to evaluate the problem and what knowledge is needed to solve it. 'Detect' simulates how an expert looks at a question. They make sense of the situation, look beyond the superficial details to find the deep structure This allows them to recognise this as an example of a problem type they have seen before, and recall the organised information they need to solve - key concepts. It ensures that students avoid their inclination to just look at the keywords, and dive in risking misunderstanding the situation. Detect is broken down into smaller steps, usually: draw a diagram, show values, identify unknown, decide the concept
This encourages students to bring into their working memory all their existing knowledge, externalise it on paper (to reduce working memory demands), and then home in on what's relevant to solving the problem.
The third stage of the problem solving strategy is the actual solution process using the knowledge from Recall.The Solve starts by showing how to use the knowledge from Recall and models a step by step process of moving towards a solution for the problem.We teach students how to write answers scientifically, using a variety of structures like claim-evidence-reasoning, and problem-solution, and cause-effect.
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