On Friday, October 3rd, 2025, we had our third field trip of the academic year, in which 55 fifth grade students from the Conservatory Lab Charter School came for a day on energy and electrical/environmental engineering. In a change from previous years, we implemented a Do-Now activity for the students to complete right as they entered, before we’ve shown any presentations. We started by handing each student a blank piece of 8.5×11″ inch paper and told them to turn it into the tallest possible tower (only restriction: must be on the ground). Students then built their towers; learning from what they did, we did the activity again, this time with a partner, 2 papers, and tape. Final towers were a variety of heights and designs (see picture at right) – the tallest design standing at 24.5 inches.
Students then were introduced to the Engineering Design Process, having just done it with their own tower designs. We transitioned this into an Introduction to Energy presentation. Unfortunately, due to our room set-up, we had to do both activities’ introduction presentations at once, leading to an extra long introduction presentations, but I think having the Do Now at the start helped with keeping the students focused on the presentations.
We then did two activities in two groups (switching after lunch): Solar Panels and Wind Turbines. For the Wind Turbines activity, students designed Wind Turbine blades (amount, shape, size) and picked rotor arm lengths (the red wooden dowel in the picture below). Some designs worked better than others – unfortunately, the design pictured struggled – because the rotor arm was too long and the blades were too small.
For the Solar Panels activity, each group had a lamp and a solar panel and were asked to test various materials to see how well they increased the Power output of the solar panel (by concentrating more light into the solar panel), learning about absorption, refraction, and reflection. The lighter papers helped “bounce” light onto the solar panel, whilst the darker colors absorbed the light instead. Unfortunately, we didn’t quite make it clear enough that the paper is meant to be a tube wrapped around the lamp to concentrate the light and instead some groups put the paper between the light and the solar panel -> leading to the expected outcome of 0 Power being generated. After fixing this mistake, and reminding students how to calculate the Power (and some help with decimal multiplication), students graphed their results.
The day wrapped up with a quick tour around campus on the way back to the bus. Thank you to all volunteers and teachers for the excellent field trip! First time with this school – and I think the day went great!
