The last month and a half has been a whirlwind. The last school year has become a distant memory and the approaching school year is visible just above the horizon. So far on my journey I have acquired many gifts and trinkets of knowledge to share with my students and my school community at large. I cannot wait until I arrive at port to share my experience. However, the journey is not complete, there are still other tasks to accomplish.
My biggest task is completing my lesson plans. The conundrum I am confronted with is narrowing this down. I have learned so much over the last few weeks that the volume of information could fill an encyclopedia, seriously. Every time I research one aspect of a topic it leads me to another and another. At some point I had to apply the breaks, otherwise I would have been trying to approach too broad of an area. So just recently (three days ago) I decided my focus should be on human body energy harvesting.
Energy harvesting is a broad category. Energy can be harvested in a variety of ways from the sun, wind, nuclear reactions, flowing water and so on. Human energy harvesting sounds sort of draconian. The movie The Matrix immediately comes to mind. If you are unfamiliar with the movie, in some dystopian future, humans are used to power a gang of evil robots who control the world. These robots harvest the thermoelectric energy that is innately produced by humans. Eventually a human savior arrives and destroys the entire system.
What if instead of our energy-producing prowess being used nefariously, we actually did something to benefit humankind? During my internship at ASSIST (Advanced Self Powered Systems of Integrated Technology) my cohort took part a workshop on thermoelectric energy. In a nutshell, a thermoelectric chip can be used to generate electricity using the temperature difference between our skin and the ambient temperature. There is an entire mathematical equation explaining this (which we won’t get into). The chip produces millivolts of energy, which can be used to power low energy devices.
This was an amazing breakthrough for myself because it helped me realize that we humans have the power to do incredible things. When I speak of incredible things, I mean we ourselves have the capability to provide a good amount of power to fuel our lives. There is a branch of energy harvesting called piezoelectricity. To briefly describe this immense topic, two opposing
crystals are smashed together and an electric charge is generated. Scientists and engineers have developed a shoe that can harvest this electric charge and store it in a battery inside the shoe. The battery then can be used to charge say a smartphone.
This led me to think about the implications of this technology. What if every runner at a marathon wore these shoes? The amount of energy generated would be immense! There are marathons everyday all around the world. What if these batteries were shipped to locations around the world that are energy challenged? Now again, the wheels are spinning in my head. I cannot wait to share this information with my students and see what ideas they may have about energy harvesting. That’s where the fun begins.