Lesson Plan

Teaching Sequence

Work through this resource material in the following sequence:

10 minutes

Tune In: Whales and wind power. What the?

20 minutes

Find Out: Biomimicry in Renewable Energy

10 minutes

Take Action: Get inspired by nature

5 minutes

Reflection

Tune In: Whales and wind power. What the?

Step 1

Show your students the images of a humpback whale on the attached visual explainer. As you cycle through each image, ask students to observe the whale closely. What do they notice about it? What features enable it to thrive in its environment?

Step 2

Divide students into groups of 3. Explain to your students that engineers and scientists have used inspiration from the humpback whale in making a particular renewable energy technology more efficient. Their job is to figure out which technology and how.

It is easy to google what part of the whale has been used as inspiration, so we would suggest that this activity be completed without any access to devices!

Once students have had a few minutes to study the whale and make their choices, invite each group to share with the rest of the class what part or feature of the whale they think would be useful in a renewable energy technology. Discuss the groups’ suggestions with the class to start to pique their curiosity about how we can utilise nature to aid in design.

(The answer is the bumps on their fins have inspired the design of wind turbine blades!)

Step 3

Watch the following video with your students that explains which part of the whale inspired the design of wind turbine blades and why.

What Can a Humpback Whale Teach a Wind Turbine? | Think Like a Tree - WIRED (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FMG5Ah1g8rM)

Find Out: Biomimicry in Renewable Energies

Step 1

Explain to students that biomimicry, coming from the words bio (life) and mimic (copy), is a practice that mimics strategies found in nature to aid in human designs. Organisms on earth, such as plants, animals and microbes, have spent millions of years adapting and evolving in order to survive and thrive, which leads to some incredibly innovative and efficient features. Biomimicry aims to learn from these in order to look for more sustainable and efficient design solutions. You can find out more about biomimicry from the Biomimicry Institute.

As you tell students this, you might like to show them some other famous biomimicry examples on the attached visual explainer. These show how burrs served as inspiration for velcro, and the kingfisher bird served as inspiration for the bullet train. You might like to discuss which features humans have mimicked and why.

Step 2

In the previous lesson in this unit, students learned about the efficiencies of electricity generation through fossil fuels and renewable sources. This lesson aims to build on this knowledge by showing how innovators, scientists and engineers are using nature to inspire their renewable energy technologies and increase the efficiency of the way we produce energy. We recommend teaching the previous lesson prior to this one or providing your students with some background knowledge on energy efficiency.

Watch the following video with your students, which outlines how wind turbines are also being made more efficient with inspiration from owls and maple seeds.

More Efficient Wind Turbines Inspired by Owls and Maple Seeds - Biomimicry Institute (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3VtbXeIaJeI)

Step 3

There are countless ways that biomimicry has been used in all types of engineering. However, in this lesson, we want to focus on those innovations that have already or aim to increase the efficiency of renewable energy technologies.

Ask students: Why is it important to try to increase the efficiency of renewable energy as much as possible?

Suggested response: Society relies on the burning of huge amounts of fossil fuels to generate the amount of electricity we need. As we transition away from fossil fuels and to cleaner sources of energy in the fight against climate change and improving sustainability, it is important that these technologies can produce the largest amount of energy from the sources we have available in order to keep decreasing our reliance on fossil fuels.

Step 4

Invite students to explore the following website.

Ask Nature (asknature.org)

Their task is to find a biomimicry application that is being used in renewable energy and answer the following questions

What is the design principle - ie what part of nature does it come from?
Where is it being used in renewable energy?
How does it increase efficiency?
Does it have any other positive benefits?
Is this design being scaled and used in electricity generation anywhere in the world? If it isn’t, how could it be?

These strategies within the Energy in Nature category are a great place to direct your students if they have trouble navigating the site. Some of our favourites are Butterfly wings directing solar energy and Sunflowers Fibonacci secrets in capturing solar energy

Take Action: Get inspired by nature

Step 1

Divide students into groups of 3-4. Their task is to design their own feature for a renewable energy technology using inspiration from the environment around them.

The renewable technologies could be

Solar
Hydro
Tidal
Wind
Geothermal
Bioenergy

These technologies were explored in Lesson 1 of this unit. If your students are familiar with the workings of these technologies, you can allow students to explore freely and draw inspiration from the environment until they come across something that jogs their memory around one of these technologies. If your students aren’t familiar with how these renewable technologies work or need a refresher, these short videos can help them understand how these technologies take their input energy and transform it into electricity. You may like to assign students a particular energy type in order to narrow down their choices when they are exploring.

If possible, get your students out into the school yard to explore their environment and look for inspiration! If not, students could browse the web to find interesting and cool adaptations of plants and animals that could be used to create something effective.

Depending on how much time you have, this could be a design sprint with your students or you could delve a little more deeply into the best ways to practise biomimicry by identifying the functions of biological strategies, identifying what you want your design to do, recognizing context and understanding systems thinking using the systems of the Earth. The Biomimicry Institute has some great resources in its toolbox for tackling this with your students.

Step 2

To aid in their design, encourage students to focus on the following questions once they have found a few features that might be suitable.

What attracted you to this feature?
What renewable technology could be made more efficient by this feature and why?
How would you use this feature in your design?
Draw a picture of your design and annotate it with how you believe it will increase the efficiency of your renewable technology.

Step 3

Students can share their designs with each other. Encourage discussion within your class around the strengths of the designs and any possible areas for improvement, and get students to think about how other group's designs could work in harmony with their own.

Optional Extension - What careers would enable less greenhouse gas emissions in the future?

To build upon this knowledge of the projects and technologies that are being used (or could be used in the future) to transition to a net zero economy, students could be tasked with diving a little deeper into the careers that will enable these projects to exist and flourish.

Students can use the document ‘The Million Jobs Plan: Powering jobs, wages and economic growth’, which is available online at The Million Jobs Plan - Beyond Zero Emissions (bze.org.au).

Students can choose one of the sectors they have researched above and use the plan and the internet to prepare a job advertisement for a career that this industry needs. It should explain:

The renewable energy and what it is
Where the job will be (where is this project likely to be established?)
The potential growth in the particular industry
How many different types of jobs (and potential numbers) that the industry or industries need
Why it would be a good job to go into for the future

Reflection

What skills did you use or learn today that you think would be helpful to society as we move towards more sustainable energy generation methods?

What factors should society be considering as we think about ways of generating electricity in the future?

Dive into the future job market of the energy industry. Research and find at least one intriguing job role in the energy sector that didn't exist a decade ago. Share the job title and a brief description of what this role involves.

If students are interested in what they have been learning today, you might like to direct them to this webpage from the Clean Energy Council, which provides a snapshot of the roles and careers that exist in the Australian Clean Energy Sector. This can show them how many different opportunities exist in the renewables industry!

Using Nature as Inspiration to Engineer Renewable Energy Efficiency

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UN Sustainable Development Goals

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