Stylin' your ride
Student design project
This project will be set up like a webquest. It may actually turn into a webquest if I have time before I teach it. The order in which we are expected to teach the curriculum has not yet been set. If it does become a webquest, it will be located at my website http://mrsesty.tripod.com, which is maintained only to the extent that I am using particular sections of it in my classes. Incidentally, there are other interesting projects on the website, but be forewarned that there may be broken links. Regardless of whether or not they have a webquest when they get to this unit, the students will be asked to prepare for a symposium to present a strategic transportation plan to the city. In order to participate in the symposium, the students will need to become an expert in one or more, depending on class size, type of transportation technology. Just like participants in a real symposium, the students will be asked to present papers on their research. Finally, again like the real world, the students will be asked to put together a plan to present to the city for a new more efficient transportation system.
The Overview
Before being sent out on their own to do research, I plan to give an overview of all of the technology described in the two previous sections, old school technology and new school technology. Ideally, I would be able to do this as a PowerPoint presentation with a few hands-on activities. In the real world, I will probably end up presenting this section at the board with the same hands-on activities. In any case, this section is here to give some ideas for the hands-on activities. The two topics that I anticipate will be most difficult for my students to comprehend are combustion chemistry and the complex workings of combustion engines.
The chemistry of carbon is one of the more important topics that my students learn in integrated science. Understanding the stoichiometry required in the chemistry of carbon is one of the more challenging aspects of this topic. My students have trouble comprehending how and why the chemicals on the reaction side are rearranged to form the chemicals on the products side of the reaction. I have invented a game in my classroom that seems to help the students sort out what happens. The game is the reaction store. It is based on playing store, like I did as a child. The game starts with a reaction written on the board. I will put together examples of the chemicals used in the equation, at least at the beginning, so the students will be able to see what they look like. In our game, I am the storekeeper; I keep all of the chemicals that are found on the reactants side of the reaction. The students have to make the chemicals on the products side of the reaction. The students are given scraps of paper to represent money and they must buy their ingredients, their reactants, to use to make their products. The students can buy as much of the reactants as they like, but the students with the most money, paper scraps, at the end wins. Extra bits and pieces left over from inefficient processing cost money to pay for disposal, so the students learn that they should buy only what they need and make sure that the reaction is properly balanced. At the end of the round, we count up how many of each reactant the students "bought" and how many of each product the students made and write the numbers into the equation. This process works well in my classroom because I tend to have small classes, but it could easily be applied to larger classes by breaking the students into groups and having one student in each group act as a shopkeeper. In my room, I use a motley collection of chemical models that I inherited with my rooms, but anything could be used that can be recombined to form products from reactants. Legos come to mind as well as scraps of paper, and erector sets and tinker toys, almost all of which have the added benefit of being less expensive per piece than chemical model kits.
The complex workings of a combustion engine are far easier to explain if you have a model or a picture. I do not have a model yet, but I do know where to find an excellent picture. The book How to keep your Volkswagen alive has marvelous illustrations both of the engine and of the engine as a part of the whole vehicle [10]. The engine illustration is also very well labeled. Precisely how you get multiple copies of an illustration from one copy of a book, I leave to your own ingenuity. I plan to have my students color the parts of the engine and take notes on them as we go through the engine. I suspect that it will take a few days if we do it in detail, but I think the added knowledge will be of particular benefit to my class. The only way my students can enter our school is with proof of pregnancy, so I have a class of girls. Most of my students do not drive, but some have been enrolled in a votech program training to be mechanics. At any rate, the comprehension of the basic workings of this ubiquitous technology is likely to be useful in all of my student's lives. If I happen to have a bored or ambitious student along the way, I may offer her extra credit to build a model of a generic internal combustion engine to use in future years.
The research
After being given an overview of the various technologies described in the two previous sections and any new ones that come up between now and when I am teaching the unit, the students will be asked to choose a technology to study. In my class, because it tends to be small, I may ask the students to choose one new technology and one old one. The students will do the research online and in the books that I have found on particular topics.
The students will be asked to write a paper to present to our symposium on the costs and benefits of the technology and put together some sort of visual representation of a new idea for their type of technology. The paper will be about one page in length and will be typed so that it can be put together with the other papers into the proceedings of our conference. The paper will focus on the economic, environmental, social, and societal costs and benefits of the technology they have chosen to study. For example, a car has economic cost in that it must be purchased or leased and maintained, environmental costs in that it produces carbon dioxide, social costs in that most people drive alone, and societal costs in that roads must be maintained. However, it has economic benefits in that a person can work further from home for more money, environmental benefits in that they can be less harmful than other forms of transportation, social benefits in that they confer social status, and societal benefit in that higher social status makes happier people. I would expect far more detail from my students, and I may have stretched a few points here in my example, but you get the idea. The students will also be expected to be able to explain how their technology works and prepare an illustration of some potential improvement to their technology.
The presentation
The students will be asked to present their research to the class. Ideally, the students will prepare a short PowerPoint presentation, but I will have to see what our technology situation is when I teach this unit. The presentation allows all of the students to hear about the costs and benefits of the various types of technology and teaches my students useful presentation skills. The students will also be encouraged to take notes on the presentations of their classmates for later use in the symposium. Ideally, the students could be given forms for each type of technology and be asked to write down significant ideas from each presentation.
The symposium
The symposium will require the students to synthesize the information they have gained through their own research and that of their classmates. The students will be asked to come up with a grand scheme for transportation in the city. The only requirement is that they must show how the mix of technologies in their proposed system is an improvement over the current one in the four categories, economic, environmental, social, and societal, that they studied. Ideally, this information could be presented to some important dignitary for appreciative comments. In a class larger than the ones typical in my room, I would suggest two or three symposia. Alternatively, the students could be asked to break up into sub-committees to come up with a solution to issues relating to a particular category.
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