Strategies and Activities
As mentioned in the background and rationale, this unit is designed to fit within the larger unit of my freshman environmental science course on energy. I plan to introduce the concept of the battery at the start of the unit, while we are studying the types of energy and transformation between the forms. This will be done via an inquiry lab in which students will identify the purpose of a battery by building upon a lab that is currently done in which students visit stations at which they witness and identify various energy transformations. This will be followed by a lab in which students will create their own battery using a modified version of the lab found in chapter 4, activity 6 of the book utilized by our chemistry students. 16 (See Appendix C: Battery Lab) This will be followed by partnership with our Equipment and Technology Institute students in which the sophomores in that course, upon completing their unit on batteries, would come in and teach what they have learned to our freshman environmental science students.
Throughout the year, our school works on College Readiness Standards once a week. During the time we spend on this unit, we will also be utilizing charts and graphs from articles on batteries for our work on these standards. Select articles for this work are presented in Appendix E.
After completing the battery lab and having the presentation from the ETI students, we will return to our exploration of energy resources in general. We will study the basics of a power plant and the environmental consequences of our reliance upon coal. However, we will decrease the temporal emphasis given to coal and increase the amount of time spent studying alternative energies. As we do so, we will return to the idea of batteries as having the potential to address current limitations of some alternative energy. At this time, it is my hope that this connection will happen organically, but if necessary, I will formally reintroduce batteries as we wrap up our exploration of renewable resources. This would mimic the history of batteries. Simple batteries, such as the Leyden Jar, were developed long before we had use for them. 3 Similarly, my students will study batteries prior to their formal introduction to alternative energy. However, once the potential to utilize batteries in conjunction with renewable energy is identified as a class, we will return to and study them in depth.
Students will read excerpts from The Battery by Henry Schlesinger and will develop a battery timeline. This will include the statement that
"According to some experts, significant improvement in traditional battery technology may be coming to an end. The last major breakthrough, lith-ion batteries during the 1990s, say some experts, brought the industry close to the end of the line of usable materials. We are, they say, at the point of incremental improvements." 1 7
Using this assertion a catalyst, students will be broken into groups to analyze journal articles on recent advancements in the area of battery technology. Since the articles vary in terms of their readability, groups will be formed based on homogeneous grouping of reading level. I determined the readability by typing the first sentence of each article into an online calculator. 18 The articles are listed in Appendix D and ranked according to their Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level, with A being the simplest, and H representing the most difficult. In cases where the entire article is not to be used, that is noted in the table as well. Because the reading level of the article is greater than that of the students in most cases, I will begin the lesson by stressing to the students that they are not expected to understand everything in the articles, but rather to get an understanding of the main idea, challenge themselves, and become familiar with various kinds of science writing. I will also work with each group privately, pulling out key points. Regardless of the article or its difficulty, students will individually answer the same questions, which are also shown in appendix D. They will then meet with their group members to check their answers and devise a means of presenting the information to the rest of the class.
To wrap up the unit, students will use the project from years past, in which they design a power plant for either: Laramie, WY; Burlington, VT; or Albuquerque, NM. However, the project will carry a new requirement, in that students will need to somehow incorporate the use of batteries (employing either current technology or advancements predicted for the foreseeable future) into their plan and subsequent presentation. Students will be cautioned to employ a "cradle to grave" philosophy in their consideration of the batteries and their impact on the environment.
Although, this unit will officially conclude with the completion of Unit 2 in March, I plan to revisit it briefly in April or May, when we make our second visit to Lake Michigan as part of our Adopt-A-Beach program. Because it is relatively easy to test for the presence of zinc in a water sample through the use of test strips, and because zinc was noted as one of the types of pollution resulting from battery litter and incineration, I think it will be interesting to see if it is present in our local water source. Of course, because zinc pollution can be due to other sources such as automobile tires, if zinc is present in Lake Michigan, its presence will not necessarily indicate battery litter. 19 However, this ambiguity would present the opportunity for my students to gain first-hand knowledge of the process of science wherein finding the "answers" to the object of our research always leads us to new questions. This, then, could lead to new research on the part of my students to determine whether there is a connection between the presence of zinc and battery waste.
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