BEAT held its annual Energy Week at Bethune during the last week of March. We educated students and staff about different important energy topics throughout the week. Each day of the week had a specific topic: Energy Conservation, Renewable Energy, Transportation, and Embedded Energy.
The Energy Conservation group showed students different ways they can use less energy. Students had an opportunity to play Energy Conservation Tic-Tac-Toe. Students also had a chance to explore the interactive felt-board house where they were given energy fact cards and had to place them in the correct room in the house. This enhanced the learning of conserving energy in the house. Students were also able to try out different household appliances with watt-metres to see what the phantom load was.
Renewable Energy group had a display board educating students and staff about renewable energy sources, such as solar panels, biogas, wind and hydroelectricity. TREC brought in two solar panels and a model wind turbine to demonstrate to the students how they work. We also had solar powered toys as well as a renewable energy quiz that the students could do for a chance to win a power bar. Students had a lot of fun with the interactive activities.
The Transportation group had an interactive display board where people could come and see how much energy it would take for them to get to school. It also showed them how much energy it took to get from the feeder schools to Bethune. Stickers were given to people who participated. There was also a TTC ticket giveaway for people so answered quiz questions correctly.
The final day was Embedded Energy, which was a new concept for most people. As embedded energy is such a large topic, our focus was on embedded energy in food. To help them understand more, we showed various videos to students. After watching the videos, students had to answer some questions about embedded energy and they were awarded with local foods. We had local apples and carrots and asked them what they thought about these foods compared to imported foods. A lot of them said the local foods tasted the same or even better then imported foods! We also made sweet potato chips out of local sweet potatoes.








