Thorburn Consolidated gets started with energy!

Last month, Engagement Officer Pam had the opportunity of visiting Mr. (Jeremy) Walker’s Grade 6 science class at Thorburn Consolidated School. The students got to participate in the “Getting Started with Energy” presentation, learning about energy, electricity, electricity in Nova Scotia, and how we can use energy efficiency in our homes and schools to reduce our energy needs. The students also watched the “Vampire Power” video, which explains how our electronics can still waste electricity when not in use, and how to reduce this waste (by unplugging them!).

After the presentation, three volunteers, Logan, Bradley and Adele came up to the front of the class to test out common household devices in an energy meter. The volunteers first worked with the class to guess which devices took more power, and putting them in order from least to most energy needed. They had a lamp with incandescent light bulbs of 100W and 60W, a 15W CFL, and a 7W LED light bulb, a LED night light, Christmas mini-lights, newer LED Christmas lights, an iPad (charger), and a hair dryer. The students were pretty amazed how the LED Christmas lights, and the LED nightlight read 0W on the energy meter, versus the 100W light bulb which used 109W, while the hair dryer went up to 1300W!

The class had some great questions, like “Why don’t we use lightning for electricity, if it’s already occurring naturally?” That’s a great question, and maybe these students will grow up and find ways to harvest lightning as useable energy!