What Is This Course?

This course is an expedition into learning about electric technology. The main purpose of the course is to stimulate students to create possible future technologies that make our world a better place. It is based on the assumption that the students of today can probably think up completely new forms of technology - totally different - and totally better - than what we see around us right now.

It has been given once in a short, three week version in two schools at once. Below is a proposal to really have fun with it!

One great way to be of real service with this course is to run it in several schools at once! By having an entire community of students thinking together on the same issues they will be doing real science. And their contribution to the adult scientific community may surprise us all!

Only the core is similar!
Each school must invent its own course ...

The similar part lies in the CORE of the course. Each school will have to invent what the rest of the course is. The essential thing is that all of the schools have this one part in common so that the students form a scientific community of ideas that are in a constant state of revision - across geographic, cultural boundaries! Here is the overview of the course.

• THE JURY'S SENTENCE - THE CORE PART FOR ALL SCHOOLS
  The course is taught as if we were preparing for a legal trial. Each technological device will be sentenced to "Perform 5 years of community service to nature and humankind". The big performance at the end of the course is the trial itself. During the trial students will put various forms of electric technology (such as the CD player, the television, etc.) on the stand as if they were people. A student jury will sentence the technologies - and this is the core - students will keep revising the other sentences from the community of schools. The criteria for judging the electric technology and prescribing its sentence will be that it must do some kind of community service - that it must serve the community of humankind and nature.
  
  
• HERE IS ONE WAY THIS COURSE WAS ALREADY DONE
  As you can imagine, this course can be invented in many ways. It can be primarily historical, literary, scientific, or of your own design. One way it was given simultaneously at the two schools: The Prairie Hill School, Peewaukie, WI and The Aurora School, West Allis, WI was primarily as a technology / physics / history expedition as follows.
  
  A key witness was brought to the trial, Michael Faraday. We saw the birth of electric technology through his eyes. Mr. Faraday requested biographical testimonies from a dozen others from the scientific community of his time. Each student prepared a dossier on a scientist and appeared in court as an expert witness.
  
  Then we physically re-invented four of the first electrical inventions: the battery, the generator, the motor, and the transformer. About 10 other live physics demonstrations were given to ground the students' experience of this knowledge.
  
  Then each student researched a different electric technology and 'put it on the stand in court'. For example, the CD player got on the stand and had to tell the jury what it has done for the world that was helpful - and how it may have been hurtful.
  
  The sentencing of the technologies is the core of this course. The students imagined what we can do to simultaneously serve nature and humankind as if all of the natural world were one community. We placed our sights in the near future, the next 5 years - not in some far off vague time to come. We discussed when technology is truly for our good. This is the part that can be done by several schools at once with a return on our investment beyond measure! If students continually build on each other's ideas through constant communal revisions, I believe we may see surprising results! We may see the students come up with technologies truly worth inventing. And if we do this in concert with the larger scientific community, perhaps the students can actually add a perspective that the current scientific researchers do not have.
  
  Finallly we produced the trial as an electrical technology product. We made it into a website production. The trial was also made into a computer CD-ROM and into a fully interactive DVD. Because this was the first time this expedition was given and since we only tried a 3 week expedition, the programming had to be done by the teacher. A longer version of this course might have students doing this part, also.
  
  
• EACH TEACHER MUST INVENT HER/HIS OWN COURSE
  Our main product was the technological production of the trial in the form of the website / CD / DVD. And our main lessons revolved around the physics of electricity and the history of Michael Faraday and the scientists responsible for the first electrical inventions.
  
  To keep the core of the expedition, you need only keep the sentencing of the technologies. The trial can be anything you like - for instance it could be a dramatic performance for the parents. The physics of the first inventions is not necessary, nor are the biographical histories. The entire course can be based on literature. It is also not necessary that the product itself involve technology. The product can be a musem display or a written treatise.
  
  I hope you are one of the teachers who wants to work on this together with us. If so, then your first thought will have to be: "How can I have fun inventing my own handling of some events leading up to a TRIAL?" Then ask yourself, "How can we produce the TRIAL?" Will you put on a play? Will you write a special edition of a news program? Will you make a movie of the TRIAL? Will you write another book like "Inherit The Wind"?
  
  I just can't wait to see the variety of approaches when students from different parts of the world are working on the future of technology. And much more than that - I can't wait to see what happens when we take an invention and revise it and revise it and revise it - all the time building on each others' ideas.
  
  I do believe that this generation of students can create a completely new form of technology that is truly good for all things great and small.

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