Abstract
(1) Background: Due to the high proportion of disadvantaged students in a rural school in Taiwan and the gap between students’ concepts and practices of environmental protection and sustainable energy, four science and mathematics teachers in this school planned an engineering-centred PjBL of sustainable energy curriculum in a Makers Club to enhance students’ creativity, engineering technical skills, practices of environmental protection and sustainable energy, and learning attitudes; (2) Methods: This study is a four-year action research. Teachers and students initiated the idea from rebuilding an old fan in a classroom; (3) Results: The students in the Makers Club improved their engineering technical skills and created various green-power generation devices (evolved from a ventilation ball generator, hydropower, ocean current power generators to tiny, 3D-printing wind power generators). They turned environmental protection and sustainable energy concepts into actions during practices and won awards from science and engineering fairs every year. This creative and supportive atmosphere spread from the club to the whole school and improved the students’ practices of environmental protection and learning attitudes after long-term implementation; (4) Conclusions: The design principles of the engineering-centred PjBL of sustainable energy curriculum played a critical role and were outlined at the end of the study.
Highlights
Accepted: 20 September 2021This study was conducted in a rural middle school, Longevity Junior High School, in Eastern Taiwan
To address the problems encountered in the Longevity Junior High School, four mathematics and science teachers began to implement a four-year action research program
The four club teachers reflected on the development of students’ creativity and engineering technical skills as they designed the curriculum, asking themselves: Has the concept of environmental sustainability been translated into action? Have attitudes toward learning improved? the curriculum was revised and adjusted per the results of these questions, and an action plan for improvement was developed for the following year
Summary
Accepted: 20 September 2021This study was conducted in a rural middle school, Longevity Junior High School (anonym), in Eastern Taiwan. Many children in rural areas are from low-economic backgrounds; they lack family education resources and are usually overlooked by educational policies. These children cannot obtain better educational achievement [1] and have negative attitudes toward learning. The Tzu Chi Foundation, an NGO organization that has been promoting environmental sustainability in Taiwan for more than 30 years [2,3,4], is the most active and down-to-earth of these charity groups. Longevity Junior High School invites the Tzu Chi Foundation to its campus every semester to promote the ideals of “Environmental sustainability, environmental protection, love the earth” to improve students’ ideas of sustainable energies and do something positive
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