Teaching Strategies and Activities
IBHL students' program will develop seminars explaining sources of energy where a chemical process is present. During the seminar, the students will be orally presenting a topic of one of the sources of energy discussed in this Unit: Fossil fuel, Nuclear Energy, Solar Energy, and Hydrogen combustion.
Each presentation will be graded based on a rubric created for this particular activity.16 One important thing to keep in mind is that all the students will participate assessing the presentation.
Some of the items included in the rubric are:
Nonverbal skills: eye contact, body language, poiseVerbal skills: Enthusiasm, elocutionContent: subject knowledge, organization, and mechanics.
Writing Extended Essays for IBHL students of 11 and 12 degrees using some of the Unit's topics and emphasizing the environmental impact of each, using the 12 principles of Green Chemistry.
Performing laboratory experiments where they apply concepts and laws related to Thermochemistry. One of the activities will be determining the heat of solution of solid17 using a calorimeter. Another experiment that the students can do is to calculate the enthalpy of combustion using a Calorimeter.18 During the realization of the labs as mentioned earlier, the students will need to apply their knowledge and skills to Thermochemistry; concepts like Hess Law, Heat, Endothermic, and Exothermic will be to be used.
One of the experiments they can do is burning different materials: paper, wood, alcohol, oil. The students will get a beaker with water and assume that they will measure the heat absorbed by water to determine the material that will release the higher amount of heat, keeping in mind that they will be some heat lost by going to the surroundings.
Another interesting experiment to assign to the students will be to calculate how much a cold liquid, such as milk, must be added to another hot liquid (coffee) to reach a particular temperature, for instance, 70 oC. The students will need to use the formula Q=m*C*ΔT where m is the mass of the liquid used, Q is the heat absorbed (+) or released (-), C is the heat capacity, and ΔT the difference in temperature (Final temperature-initial temperature, ΔT=Tf-Ti).
Because the hot liquid is releasing the heat to the cold liquid, the overall formula should be -Q (hot liquid) = Q (cold liquid). Combining this formula, the students will need to finally use the following formula:
- m (hot liquid) * C (hot liquid)* ΔT (hot liquid) = m (cold liquid) C (cold liquid) ΔT (cold liquid)
At the end of this experiment, the students will need to perform it a Laboratory setting where they will use thermometers, beakers, and graduated cylinders to check if they previous calculation where right.
Another activity suggested for this energy topic will be using the following resources online to assign reading, videos, or projects that students can learn more about the different sources of producing energy. Some of the resources are:
Newsela is an education website focused on building student reading comprehension by providing high-quality news articles and real-time assessments for students in grades 2–12. One example of this activity will be assigned a reading following a quiz of the following articles: What is nuclear energy, and is it a viable resource?19, and Types of renewable energy 20 (Nunez, 2019, 2020).
The TED-Ed project — TED's education initiative — makes short video lessons worth sharing, aimed at educators and students. One example of an activity for the student will be assigned the following video’s lesson how do solar panels work? - Richard Komp21 . After watching the video, the students will need to answer some of the free responses or multiple-choice questions 22 listed below, and they will be graded.
What is light?
What are the significant physical barriers to using solar cells and modules?
What are
the significant social and political barriers to using solar energy?
What are most solar cells made
from?
What is the carrier of the electric current from solar cells?
What from the Sun causes the solar
cell to produce electricity?
What creates the potential difference (voltage) in a solar cell?
How
efficient are the normal commercial solar cells?
EDpuzzle is a teaching tool used to place interactive content into pre-existing videos from various sources, such as TED or YouTube, or into videos you have made. One example of the video with a quiz inserted on it will be Types of Energy and Energy Conversions23
For assessment the students will be using online tools for Quizzes and tests using some of the tools available on Internet like: Zipgrade24 and Quizziz.25 Below are some of the questions that the students will need to answer using Quizziz related to energy, this tool can be used not only to grade the students but also to practice some of the topics explained in this Unit. You can assign points for completion or just for the correct answer. Using Quizziz also let the students to play as a game, which increases the motivation and engagement of the students.
Why solar energy is considered renewable energy?
What is a renewable resource?
What is given off as
waste in a hydrogen-fueled car?
If a tractor-trailer truck is 20% efficient, what happened to the other
80%?
What is the advantage of nuclear energy?
What is a half-life?
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