The Eco-club evaluated that during the year 2021-2022, the school used for too much electric. This has improved so far and 23-24 year is only slightly over the expected well managed school example. The Eco-club students needed to evaluate the difference in electric use between the years, 2022-2023 and 2023-24. To do this students had to use addition skills, evaluation of pie charts and graphs. Division and then convert these in to percentages. The Eco-club used the inclusion units math lesson the do this.
Activity description
Energy Sparks charts are a great way to practise looking at real data.
Before you start you need to know what a kW and a kWh is as lots of Energy Sparks charts have the option to show the energy data in kW or kWh.
kW stands for kilowatt. A kilowatt is simply 1,000 watts, which is a measure of power. So, for example, a 10,000 watt electric shower could also be called a 10 kilowatt shower.
A kilowatt hour (kWh) is a measure of how much energy you’re using. It doesn’t mean the number of kilowatts you’re using per hour. It is simply a unit of measurement that equals the amount of energy you would use if you kept a 1,000 watt appliance running for an hour. So if you switched on a 100 watt light bulb, it would take 10 hours to use up 1 kWh of energy. A 1,000 watt drill needs 1,000 watts (1 kW) of power to make it work, and uses 1 kWh of energy in an hour of continuous use.
Now, here are some questions you could try while looking at the data:
Using line charts
Explore the daily electricity charts for your school
Find the electricity data for your school for last Wednesday. How many kW of electricity were you using, when your electricity use was highest? What time of day was this? What do you think was happening in the school at this time? You can click on the legend to hide the data for other days.
Can you find how many kW of electricity your school was using at 1am last Wednesday? How much electricity would you expect to use at 1am when no one was in the school? Were you surprised at how much you were using?
Change units
Explore
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