Mobile Energy Laboratories

The Mobile Energy Laboratory is an interactive energy educational tool that comes with educational materials  correlated to California’s Science Content Standards.  The Mobile Energy Lab covers subjects such as lighting, building shell, and control technologies, and it teaches the students how to identify energy efficient equipment and how that equipment should be used.

The Mobile Energy Lab adds a twist to traditional classroom teaching, by bringing the content learned in textbooks to life.  Each mobile lab set consists of three transportable modules that carry many interactive educational gadgets to teach students the basics about energy and energy efficiency.  The  materials that accompany each Mobile Energy Lab have  lessons to teach students about power generation, lighting technologies, basic heat transfer, appliances, controls and much more.

The mobile labs bring to life what students learn from the educational materials.   Instead of looking at pictures, students have fully operational T-12 and T-8 fluorescent lamps right in front of them, so they can compare the light quality from each.   They can also compare the amount of heat generated by an incandescent lamp, when compared to a compact fluorescent lamp, to discover why the former is so grossly inefficient compared to the latter. 

We designed the Mobile Energy Lab with the interest of students in mind.  Therefore we have incorporated many fun elements to the design.  As an example, in Module 1 students will be able to use a crank generator to light up small incandescent light bulb as a demonstration of how difficult it is to generate energy.  However, instead of having one bulb, we designed the unit to have five that could be lighted in sequence, so the harder the student cranks, the more lamps light up.