Transformation of An Outdoor Classroom into an Eco Station

We were approached at the beginning of this year by a school who had recently received a grant and who wanted to spend the money on a project which could be used to teach the children about the environment and sustainability and ideally some STEM based curriculum learning too. We love projects such as these because they allow us to be creative and adventurous in what we can propose. We like to “think outside of the box”

The school had an existing timber outdoor classroom (below) on the playground

and it was therefore our idea to turn this into a fully fledged Eco Station which would tick all of the boxes for the grant. We would achieve this by adding the following features:

1. We fitted a special “bug hotel” panel to the side of the outdoor classroom to attract insect wildlife and to serve as an educational tool to teach school children about biodiversity and encourage students to care for their environment by creating habitats for insects
2. 2 x large planters where the children can now start to grow their own food – again a principal part of the whole Eco Schools programme for healthy living initiatives
3. We fitted roof guttering and a water butt to the building to promote rainwater harvesting – the water which has been collected in the water butt can now be used by the children to water the plants or food they will be growing in the planters
4. 2 x sleeper cold boxes
5. A Today’s Weather educational panel mounted onto some extra upper panels we installed which the children can use to monitor and study daily and seasonal weather patterns
6. A bird box to attract bio-diversity and to allow the children to appreciate nature
7. And perhaps the most important feature of all – the renewable energy Power Energy Mixer system which teaches children all about how renewable energy is created from three principle sources, namely human (Eco bike the children have to pedal to create kinetic energy), wind (wind turbine) and solar (roof mounted solar power). The energy created from all three sources all feeds into a central monitoring and controls feature board which has switches, a digital LED display board, LED “ant” indicators showing flow and speed of energy and two power sockets which is then “earthed” via an earth bar which goes into the ground. We also supplied a light mounted above the board so that the outdoor classroom can be used in the autumn and winter months when the days are shorter and it gets dark earlier on. All powered by pure renewable energy and not the grid.

 

When you first look at the panel, you have several key components:

• On the left side, there are three icons representing each generation source:
  • Green for human power from the Eco Bicycle
  • Blue for wind power from the wind turbine
  • Red for solar power from the solar panel
    

    energy mixer system being used in a STEM class

The board also features a touch button to turn the system on and this also alternates between the five screens on the digital display board once pressed. The five digital screens give information on the battery level storage, watt and watt hours created by each energy input, trends, energy generated over time and consumption (usage). This information can then be used for key stage 1 and key stage 2 STEM based curriculum learning and we have put together some lesson plans which the school can use for this.

It has quite literally transformed the playground into somewhere where the children can now truly go to learn outdoors but more importantly to actively participate in the learning process about how we can all be more eco-friendly and lead the way in creating a sustainable future for the planet