Influencing Earth’s Spheres with Renewable Energy

This lesson is designed to build students’ competencies in the following skills:

• critical thinking
• collaboration
• communication
• curiosity
• community engagement
• problem-solving
• global citizenship

Australian Curriculum (v9.0) content description: Year 10, Earth and Space Sciences

Students learn to:

• use models of energy flow between the geosphere, biosphere, hydrosphere and atmosphere to explain patterns of global climate change (AC9S10U04)
• analyse and connect a variety of data and information to identify and explain patterns, trends, relationships and anomalies (AC9S10I05)

Relevant parts of Year 10 achievement standards: Students can describe trends in global climate change patterns and identify causal factors. They can analyse and connect a variety of data and information to identify and explain patterns, trends, relationships, and anomalies.

NSW Syllabus outcomes:

• analyses the impact of human activity on the natural world (SC5-ENV-01)
• evaluates current and alternative energy use based on ethical and sustainability considerations (SC5-EGY-01)

General capabilities: Critical and Creative Thinking, Personal and Social Capability 

Cross-curriculum priority: Sustainability 

Level of teacher scaffolding: Medium: facilitate discussion, group work and research. Some explicit teaching of concepts is required.

UN SDG 13: Take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts

• Target 13.3: Improve education, awareness-raising and human and institutional capacity on climate change mitigation, adaptation, impact reduction and early warning.

• Device capable of displaying audiovisual materials
• Student devices for individual research

This lesson has been developed in partnership with the Queensland Government through Queensland's Clean Energy Workforce Roadmap. Cool.org would like to acknowledge and express our gratitude to the Clean Energy Council for the expertise and advice provided in creating these resources.

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