Kids and Wind Power

You can t see it touch it or smell it And yet its power is worth studying at least to a teaching consultant from the Twin Cities Debbie Kuehn tells us why so many teachers want to hear what Michael Arquin has to say What do you get When you hand a bunch of science teachers some pvc pipe and a cutter Aside from an entertaining way to spend the afternoon you get a great hands-on lesson in wind energy JoAnn Schapp Bishop Ryan HS-I think a lot of the prep work is going to be teacher-driven at my age level I think it s going to be some neat activities to do when the kids come back to the classroom Meet Michael Arquin a man who dreams of saving the enviroment one kid at a time Mike Arquin KidWind-I m pretty a wind geek is what you could call me I was teaching a lot of this in my classroom and this was a hobby KidWind was a hobby for a number of years It s now turned into we have six employees and we re in St Paul We make a lot of gear and equipment and we go all over the US Through his Kidwind Project Michael is able to teach thousands how to save energy and money This week he s gathered twenty elementary and secondary educators at Minot State University to share lesson plans and experiments Mike-I was a teacher for ten years and the reason we starte I don t typically go out and do stuff with kids cause I know I get 20-30 teachers in the room I can impact about 3-thousand kids cause they each have about 100 kids they re going to work with each year So they are kind of on the front line And if these teachers are able to get students excited about exploring new forms of energy Who knows what could happen JoAnn-What kids are exposed to now and what they can start thinking about you know they re great little problem solvers Put that in your pvc pipe and smoke it Debbie Kuehn KX News The KidWind workshop continues tomorrow