(539g) Outreach Methods and Modules in Partnership with a Geothermal Research Program

Supporting a departmental outreach team, particularly within a research institution, can often require a significant amount of lobbying and charity from faculty and students. Our K-14 outreach program has found success sustaining itself by moving from being solely funded by the department to supplementation through connections with various research programs. In this talk we will detail how we have developed a partnership with a large Department of Energy geothermal fracturing research project, and used that partnership to cultivate additional outreach support through our state government.

Through this work, we have also developed a variety of effective outreach modules around geothermal energy production. These modules include several inexpensive hands-on STEM activities focusing on topics of permeability, thermodynamics, and turbine energy generation. In the first module, students monitor the pressures needed to pass fluid through simulated rock samples at various flowrates. This module is meant to demonstrate the technical hurdles of passing fluid through the dense type of rock particular to the geothermal reservoir of this work. The second module uses small thermoelectric devices to illustrate the necessity of a temperature difference to extract useful work. In this module students use their body heat and ice water to power a light. In the last module, students use common blowers for cooling computer processors as turbines to generate electricity with their breath and also light various LEDs. Both the thermoelectric and blower modules use custom, inexpensive voltmeters to add quantitative activities around power generation in order to scale to student’s sophistication and meet additional curricular requirements.