What it is. Howstuffworks.com’s How Fuel Cells Work is a thorough, comprehensible explanation of fuel cells, their pros and cons, safety issues and much more, including links to other excellent sites pertaining to fuel cell research. A complete energy and transportation education module is available at Energy Education Curriculum Project. The module addresses learning standards in science, math, language arts, and social studies.

Do it yourself. Visit National Energy Technology Laboratory’s Cool Science Teacher’s Lounge for a lesson on fuel cell technology created by middle and high school students. Simple experiments in electrolysis and ionization are included.

You auto know. GM Says Its Future is in Fuel Cells at MSNBC.com is somewhat technical for middle-schoolers, but videos, animations, and an interactive car help students visualize the technology. Kids can compare the workings of gasoline and fuel cell engines.

Cool cars. After students have researched fuel cells and their use for transportation, have them design their own fuel cell-powered car and create an advertisement for it.

Get energetic. Here are additional teaching materials and interesting sites to check out. A set of lesson plans from the New York Times Learning Network involve students in issues of fuel shortages,global warming, and politics.

• More Power to You - Students explore renewable and nonrenewable energy sources and develop a documentary that explores multiple energy sources and draws conclusions about their uses. They then propose ways in which technologies that currently use nonrenewable energy sources might effectively employ renewable energy.
• Pump It Up - In this lesson, students explore the rising cost of gasoline and how it impacts people around the world differently. They learn about gasoline usage and alternate forms of energy used in several countries, and then consider the relationship between people in their country and oil.
• Adding Fuel to the Fire - Students will consider global warming and the greenhouse effect, and then explore how these issues are affecting countries with both growing and high energy usage. Then, students will graph their findings and write papers considering how continued usage can affect the future of the atmosphere and the global economy.

Where are we going? At Energyand Cars: What Does the Future Hold?from Discovery School, students are challenged to imagine what developments will arise regarding energy technology in the next 50 years. They become archaeologists and dig up Joe’s Junkyard to reconstruct the oil-dependent society of the early 21^stcentury.

Red hot hot rods. Don’t miss these two terrific Thinkquest projects. Hydrogen: An Alternative Fuel Source is not interactive, but it’s slick, sophisticated, fun to watch, and spoons out technical information in doses small enough to swallow painlessly. These are sections on fuel cell production, storage, and infrastructure. The Future of Cars is for hardcore car nuts. The clever site has some technical problems (the “Present” section has nothing in it; the “Future” photo gallery page doesn’t exist), but the “Past” section is a great history of the automobile, and the “Future” section discusses all sorts of alternative energy cars and has pictures of some really neat concept cars.

Use the search box below to perform a Google search within any of the specifc sites or general domains mentioned in this Activities section.

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