Sbec Goes To London – With The Power Predictor
Friday, 19th February, 2010
In January SBEC took a stand at BETT – the largest educational supply exhibition in the world - to show off the latest business idea from the school. This was a four-day marathon at Olympia and SBEC was the only school in the whole massive show to have a stand.
Why should SBEC want to take a stand at BETT? To show off the Power Predictor for Schools project.
The Power Predictor Project, is a collaboration with London-based company Better Generation Ltd, and is set to expand thanks to generous grants from Suffolk Education Department and the ‘Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851’. (More of this organisation later).
The story so far… The Power Predictor (PP) is a wind speed indicator that checks the viability of wind turbines and photo-voltaic panels. The device is put high up somewhere and wind speed and direction plus sunlight is checked and recorded every ten seconds. When there is plenty of data, it is analysed on-line and a report comes back showing you the records in graph form, plus the energy, electricity, CO2 that would have been saved and in addition, the best turbine to buy for your wind pattern. But for schools, it is a great learning tool providing practical and eco-friendly lessons in Geography, Science, Maths, Business, IT.
The grants are paying for lesson plans to be written so that the information can be brought to the pupils within the curriculum and then given to other schools free of charge. The schools still have to buy the Power Predictor which is £150.00.
As reported last month all of the primaries in the cluster have a free one from grants, which are now in hand at SBEC and will soon be up and collecting data. The data can then be shared around all the schools participating. This now includes around 40 schools in Suffolk, plus Norfolk, Cambridge, Essex, Wales and since the BETT show, Mexico, Malaysia, Hong Kong, China and Netherlands.
The 30 or so lessons written and connected to the PP are available on-line as is the shopping cart www.suffolkhub.org/pp . More are planned.
The pupils at SBEC will be used to check and develop the lessons and it is hoped that there will be opportunities for them to create some themselves as well as film clips of different activities.
The Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851… was the organisation that planned and created the Great Exhibition in Hyde Park (which included the Crystal Palace) and fronted by Prince Albert. It was a huge success, showing the world the ingenuity of Victorian engineers and, it made a massive profit. The funds were invested by buying up Kensington. Then to build: the V & A, the Science and Natural History museums and Imperial College. The ground rents are significant still and are used to “fund and stimulate education and engineering research”.
Mr L Hammond
Business Studies