My students designed there own photvoltaics inquiries around this question:
If you were to design a mission to explore and collect data on one of the planets in our solar system, could you use PV panels to power the mission vehicle? the data collecting probes and other equipment?
Wed, 05/15/2013 - 11:58
Series vs parallel would be a very cool ideafor an inquiry, but I really did full on student led, so the kids chose and designed everything. I set up an initial just playing with the circuit set up and multi meter use session that was the initiation/curiosity peice. After that they generated a list of variables that could be manipulated and then designed their own inquiries. This time nobody chose to connect panels at all. I had a distance group (moving away from the sun), an angle group (orbit and need to manipulate the angle during travel) and a color filter group (gaseous atmospheres affecting panel use on the planetary surfaces) because they were so focused on space travel.
Sun, 05/12/2013 - 12:12
Anne,
This is a pretty cool lesson idea. Did you have student groups that naturally gravitated towards testing panels rigged in series vs. panel rigged in parallel as a way to get differences in panel outputs? I think this would be an interesting benchmark that could easily be addressed and included in this lesson. Thanks for sharing your idea! For teachers that have access to some solar panels and simple circuit supplies, this would be a stellar lesson!