Andrea, well this is pretty embarrassing, as responding to this has been on my "to do" list for 7 months now... my sincere apologies, as you are aware us educators are stretched thin, especially boarding school teachers with three young children, like myself... anyway, enough excuses. My lesson on this, the general scope, the students fill out information on energy on an excel sheet with information from the demo, using the map view, I pick 5-10 countries, they have to add 5-10 more of their own, this has them learning about just location of countries (always shocking to find out no one has any real idea where Iraq is located, but can certainly solve a trig identity!). I have them do a HW assignment on this in which they learn some excel by learning how to sort lists, have multiple pages, and more. Also, I have them come to next class with 3 interesting and/or surprising things they found out (i.e. Canada has a ton of reserves, Japan imports all oil...). We start the next class sharing the facts we found. Next we look at the table from the demo that appears when you scroll over a country, I have them work in groups to decipher what all the statements mean, then present an explanation for the table that would explain it to a person who does not "get it". We listen to a podcast from This American Life on fracking, we compare numbers of natural gas reserves in USA from the demo, and from Wikipedia with this dispute. We have also looked at Nuclear energy in Japan (although this was after the earthquake and Tsunami that caused the accident in 2011, last year I did not go over this as in depth, as the students did not know about it, in just 5 years it had became history as much as Chernobyl, so now I mention it, but we do not go into how many nuclear power plants being shut down in Japan, and what they will do next...). We finally look at Masdar in the UAE, the irony of a solar power city funded by selling oil... anyway, that is the jist, I do some or all of this, add what fits and is of interest, for example I will certainly try to add something about Dakota pipeline this year. It takes 3-4 classes, and I sacrifice covering some of the "core" topics in precalculus, but it is worth it, and I am lucky to work at a school that is supportive of this, and creating an integrated and place based curriculum. I am more than happy to send you the worksheets I created on this (although they need an update, since I skipped doing this last year with the demo hic-up), my email is mschaefer@christchurchschool.org. Finally, so so so sorry for the delayed response... Matt
