Investigating How Turbines Create Electricity

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

• creative thinking
• critical thinking
• collaboration
• problem-solving
• prototyping

Australian Curriculum (v9.0) content description:  Year 7 & 8, Design and Technologies

Students learn to:

• analyse how force, motion and energy are used to manipulate and control engineered systems (AC9TDE8K03)
• analyse needs or opportunities for designing, and investigate and select materials, components, tools, equipment and processes to create designed solutions (AC9TDE8P01)
• generate, test, iterate and communicate design ideas, processes and solutions using technical terms and graphical representation techniques, including using digital tools (AC9TDE8P02)
• select, justify and use suitable materials, components, tools, equipment, skills and processes to safely make designed solutions (AC9TDE8P03).

Australian Curriculum (v9.0) content descriptions: Related content

Year 8 Physical Sciences

Students learn to:

• classify different types of energy as kinetic or potential and investigate energy transfer and transformations in simple systems (AC9S8U05).

Relevant parts of Year 7 & 8 achievement standards: Students can explain how the features of technologies impact on design decisions, and create designed solutions based on analysis of needs or opportunities. Students can create and adapt design ideas, processes and solutions, and justify their decisions against developed design criteria that include sustainability.

NSW Syllabus outcomes: 

Stage 4 Design and Technology

• identifies and describes a range of design concepts and processes (DT4-1)
• describes and follows a process of design when developing design ideas and solutions (DT4-2)

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

Cross-curriculum priority: Sustainability

Level of teacher scaffolding: Medium: the teacher will need to describe how hydroelectricity is generated and how water turbines work, and provide guidance and support as students design, create and test their model water turbines.

Goal 9: Build resilient infrastructure, promote inclusive and sustainable industrialisation and foster innovation

• Target 9.4: By 2030, upgrade infrastructure and retrofit industries to make them sustainable, with increased resource-use efficiency and greater adoption of clean and environmentally sound technologies and industrial processes, with all countries taking action in accordance with their respective capabilities.

• Bottle or container of water for each group
• Device to show audiovisual material (videos and Visual Explainer)
• Funnels
• Scissors
• Stopwatch (or device that has this function)
• Student Worksheet
• Tray, bucket or sink to sit the turbines in
• Water turbine building materials for each group (1 x paper/plastic cup, 1 x straw, 2 x wooden skewers per group, sticky tape)
• Whiteboard and markers

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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