On a whim a few weeks ago, I went to an open house put on by "The Science Alliance" a new group at St. Olaf. It's the brain child of two of the students, Cassie Paulsen and Emma Fitz Chapman, who wrote a grant and have been working with Professor Greg Muth to develop activities focused on green energy. I'd been expecting a nice opportunity for our kids to work with some St. Olaf students – maybe we would play a game or two…I'd done programs like this before I thought. I thought wrongly, as it turned out.
Today Cassie, Emma and two more volunteers, Kate and Sarah, showed up with an exercise bike hooked up to a battery, a wind turbine, a solar panel with two experimental "suns," a big bucket of water with a hose connected to it and a device we could use to measure the energy we were using. Every student who saw us bringing the gear up to the Herons wanted to know what we were up to.
In just two hours, students got to learn about the difference between a watt, amp and volt (made more concrete by the aforementioned bucket). They pedalled as fast as they could to store energy in a battery. They saw their amps and watts fluctuate as they pedalled faster and with more force. They measured the output of a solar panel by the amount of time it took a pump to fill a graduated cylinder and they designed experiments to test wind turbine designs.
At each station, the St. Olaf teachers encouraged the students to ask questions, make hypotheses and use
some very new and very sophisticated vocabulary. Soon, students were discussing ideas amongthemselves, debating if a certain design would change more than one variable or if the angle of the solar panel would affect its output.
Students were given special passports in which to record their hypotheses and data. Often they begged for a few more minutes in the group so that they could record one more trial.
But the impact of the visit will go far beyond the content that was taught today. Students were brimming with more questions and things they wanted to try out. Luckily, the exercise bike and the wind turbine will be staying with us for the next week so that we can keep working and thinking. Many other seeds were sown for future explorations:
- How does our solar panel work?
- How long would we have to pedal to run June's heat lamp?
- Where does the energy come from that we use to pedal the bike?
- If we got the most voltage from a wind turbine with six blades, why do St. Olaf's and Carleton's have 3?
And of course, some seeds that have been sown will bloom much farther in the future. Only 4% of Americans can name a living scientist (article here.) But in the Herons today there were four vibrant young scientists inspiring our students and opening their eyes to some new possibilities.
Thank you to Cassie, Emma, Kate, Sarah and Professor Muth for all of the work and energy you brought to the Herons today. The Science Alliance is a wonderful example of the richness the colleges can bring to our community.
The Rookery 
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