LIMA — Energy exists all around us. It exists in many forms and can be generated in many different ways.
On Friday, students at Lima North Middle School learned how to create electricity through a generator on a bicycle.
“We had the privilege of providing an energy bike for Lima City Schools. This past June four middle school girls from Lima participated in a workshop with the Ohio Energy Project. They learned the nuts and bolts of wiring. They started with stripping wire and reading wiring schematics. They wired the entire control board. They learned about energy efficiency and they came back to Lima schools to share that information,” said Nancy Glasgow, energy education manager for Energy Optimizers USA.
The energy bike was set up in the library at the school and the students behind the project gave a presentation to demonstrate how much energy it takes to turn on different types of light bulbs.
So what is the message to the students?
“Primarily energy efficiency. Why do we want to make that transition from incandescent to CFLs to LEDs? It’s a very graphic way for the students and the teachers to learn that just to get on the bike and to see how much of their mechanical energy it takes to light up the light bulbs and to keep them lit,” she said.
Lima schools has already done much to become more energy efficient through Energy Optimizers.
“The whole district has been re-lit with LED light bulbs. So that saves the district about a third of their energy costs annually,” she said.
The energy efficiency lessons these kids learned will be taught to other schools.
“Our next step is to present to the school board. We wanted to start in-house with North students. We’re going to present to the school board and to our curriculum council and then the girls will take it to the Green Team at the high school and that will probably be sometime in January,” said Valery Conrad, a fourth grade teacher at Heritage Elementary School.
“The girls are wonderful. They had a terrific time. They had a lot of firsts happen for them that they probably would have never experienced before. So it’s a great program and I thank Nancy Glasgow for everything she’s done,” Conrad said.
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