New, GK-12 Grass Roots: Advancing Education in Renewable Energy and Cleaner Fuels through Collaborative Graduate Fellow/Teacher/Grade-School Student Interactions

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PI Name: Paulette Clancy Institution Name: Cornell University Proposal Title: GK-12 Grass Roots: Advancing Education in Renewable Energy and Cleaner Fuels through Collaborative Graduate Fellow/Teacher/Grade-School Student Interactions Proposal ID: 1045513Cornell GK-12 Fellows from engineering and the physical sciences are researching new ways to create renewable energy sources (wind, solar, geothermal and biomass) and other creative ways to reduce our carbon footprint. The core and strength of this GK-12 project lies in the development of new materials for energy creation and storage that achieve high performance and remain environmentally benign. The project will place graduate students in these fields into classrooms in grades 6-12 and will leverage strengths in creating computational tools to design new energy materials, predict their properties, and work synergistically with experiments, to accelerate commercialization. Coupled with their research, Fellows will undertake a new educational program for developing communication skills that will be highly effective with diverse communities and provide a life-long societal benefit for the promotion of science. The Fellows will share their passion for energy research with students in middle and high school, especially those in Onondaga Nation schools close to Cornell. An early project, requested by the Elders, involves Fellows, faculty, and school students designing and building a solar (thermal) greenhouse as a hands-on project that fits a culture of earth stewardship. Many of the projects are strongly visual and computationally based, making them suitable for use by many communities, including students with hearing challenges, allowing their creativity to be fully realized. Fellows will enrich their research skills in energy projects, especially biofuels, through visits to a partner university in India, where they will take part in hands-on experience at a sugar mill where need for energy production must be balanced against that for food.