The following is posted on behalf of Wendy Mouche presenting a possible challenge for a club project at the Ledermann Science Center:

I rode an “Energy bike” at the Conservation Foundation/Green Earth Institute’s Fair on Sunday, May 3^rd att the booth for a DuPage NGO called “SCARCE” Learned a lot because:

• It used a familiar object to make power (bike) and,
• Unlike the power from a wall socket, I could control power output with legs and get feedback from the electrical board.
  

See pictures from SCARCE’s newsletter’s first page at http://www.bookrescue.org/Ripples/feb06Ripples.pdf for more info.

The State of Ohio also has this Energy Bike, which "provides an opportunity to demonstrate concepts of energy with a bicycle that is equipped with a generator and attached to an electrical board. The Energy Bike generates electricity to power a variety of light bulbs and small appliances and is one of the most successful teaching tools available .It allows the rider to sense their energy being transformed and trace the energy flow back to the sun. The rider can see how energy changes forms, feel the energy, hear the explanations of energy transformation and understand the measurements of energy - Volts, Amps, Watts” (http://www.ohioenergy.org/energybike.html).

Ohio’s bike and electrical board looks like a copy of the SCARCE setup.

Interesting for teachers: Ohio has a Solar School Curriculum (http://www.ohioenergy.org/energybike.html) with a Teacher Resource Guide that “provides activities and lesson plans that are correlated to Ohio’s Academic Standards for the following: Measurement; Patterns, Functions and Algebra; Data Analysis and Probability; Number, Number Sense and Operations; Mathematical Processes; Physical Sciences; Science and Technology; Scientific Inquiry; Scientific Ways of Knowing; Science and Technology and Earth and Space Stations. (http://www.ohioenergy.org/Solar%20Curriculum/2Introduction.pdf) I wonder if Illinois has compatible Academic Standards, which teachers could use in Fermi program/teacher training course design.

Themes: There are 4 public rooms/areas inside LSEC devoted to hands on High Energy Physics activities based on these themes: Accelerators, Detectors, Methods (how data is analyzed) and Ideas.
The kids really get a kick out of an Accelerator room activity in which they hand crank a bike wheel to faster and faster rpms in order to light up “quarks” attached to the rotating wheel.

Perhaps the challenge is this: Design a hands-on activity incorporating both alternatively generated power and human generated power to complement the above 4 themes.