Designing Windmills

Students design a working windmill. For this energy lesson, students will design and build a working windmill. They will discuss how the school population could be more energy-efficient in their classrooms.

After reading about how wind turbines work to collect clean energy, groups brainstorm and design their own windmill. Within the provided financial and physical constraints, groups must build a working windmill using only the materials...

Teams design and build a windmill, under budget, that can lift an object. The groups evaluate and reflect on their own design, then on those produced by other teams. The goal is to determine which design is the most...

Up it goes! Groups must design and build a windmill able to lift a weight. The packet includes discussion points to use prior to the build that cover topics such as variables, fairness, and the design process.

Can my windmill pick up a weight? Given the same set of materials, groups design and build the most efficient windmill. On the first day, groups concentrate on getting a windmill to spin, while on the second day, they modify their...

I get a charge out of this. In order to learn how a generator works, groups build and test one in this ninth lesson of the series. The generators are tested at low speed and high speed to determine the watt output and whether they have...

Students investigate technology and make a correlation between technology and the weather. In this science instructional activity, students experiment with the weather and climate using technology to help them understand forces and...

In this engineering learning exercise, 9th graders experiment with the design of a windmill blade to generate more electricity by creating a step by step plan, drawing a diagram, recording data from trials, write a conclusion and a...

High schoolers explore how to build an efficient windmill design by taking into account how the lift and drag caused by the movement of wind can be used to make the blades of the turbine move. Through their readings, hypothesis and by...

It turns out that some laws were definitely not meant to be broken! A short illustrative video explains why the first and second laws of thermodynamics prevent perpetual motion machines from actually moving perpetually — and why...