The Experience Continues

Last week, Jason and Tonja from IMSEP were able to make it over to the company to see how everything was going for the teacher externs. The other teacher externs were wrapping up their experiences here and they are now finished here so I am the only teacher extern left. Nonetheless, it was nice to get the opportunity to sit down and talk with Jason and Tonja about our experiences this summer. They were interested in knowing how things were going so that they could spread the word about our great experiences and the exciting things that we will be taking back to the classroom. It was a good reflection time to gather a lot of our thoughts from the summer and how we are going to carry things over into the classroom. I have a project in mind that I want to add to my curriculum for next year that is very similiar to the type of work that I have done this summer and it would be very good for freshman level students. I hope that I can bring the project together. My idea is to have students complete a project as part of the culmination of a recyling unit that is done in my class. I will have students generate biodiesel from leftover oil/fat food waste from our schools lunch program which is similiar to a process that I have worked with here with one of my companies products. It won't be exactly what I did here, but students will create a valuable chemical product, which is done in the chemical industry on a regular basis and students don't realize it. They will create the product, test it for quality, which I did a lot of this summer, and mock market the product to be sold. Then realistically, we will be able to donate this product to our schools maintence crew that they can use in their various diesel appliances. Hopefully I can pull this project together because I think it would be a good learning experience for students to see the practical applications of chemistry so that it benefits society, and its not just about doing random reactions for no reasons other than just to see what happens.