Students Will Learn About Energy With Solar Panel

HILTON HEAD ISLAND, S.C. – Think your job is tough? Try getting a classroom full of sixth graders excited about renewable energy.

You can tell the 11- and 12-year-olds to pull out their calculators to help explain how solar cells convert light into electricity, but that example only goes so far.

“It’s difficult to make it real to them if there’s not something to touch and feel,” Hilton Head Middle School science teacher Chris Sims said.

But lessons on solar energy are about to become more hands-on for Mr. Sims’ pupils through a new program that Santee Cooper is launching at the middle school.

The school will be the first in South Carolina to receive a 10- foot-by-10-foot solar panel to help pupils study renewable energy. Once it’s installed, they will be able to use the Internet to monitor in real time how much energy the panel is producing.

For example, if pupils go online on a sunny day, they’ll be able to see how many watts the panel is generating. Then they can compare that to the days or weeks before, when the sky might have been cloudy.

The Web site also will break down the information in interesting ways. For example, it will show how many homes the panel could power for one day or how many hours it could run a TV.

“It puts it in increments sixth graders can understand,” Santee Cooper spokeswoman Laura Varn said.

Hilton Head Middle School was chosen as the pilot school by Palmetto Electric Cooperative. Eventually, 17 other schools in the state will join the Green Power Solar School Program.

The cooperative got to pick which school Santee Cooper should donate the $20,000 panel to because it leads South Carolina in green power sales, Ms. Varn said. Green power is generated from renewable resources such as methane gas from decomposing garbage.

The panel will be installed in the middle school’s courtyard in a few months. The school’s science teachers will learn how to use the program’s software this summer and begin incorporating it into lesson plans when pupils return in the fall.

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