Suggested Activity: Challenge your students to build a windmill in this lab activity using repurposed items.
Alberta – Science 24 Alignment Guide
Summary
The Switch Classroom Alberta Science 24 curriculum alignment guide connects a wide range of lessons and activities to Alberta’s provincial standards. Each activity is mapped to general learner outcomes such as analyzing and interpreting data, evaluating impacts, designing and refining systems, and applying concepts related to energy and technology. This alignment ensures that teachers can meet outcomes while providing students with practical, hands-on experiences.
The guide highlights connections to science content areas including environmental chemistry, electricity and magnetism, electrical principles and technologies, interactions and ecosystems, and energy flow in global systems. It also links to social studies areas such as local and global resource use, policy decisions, industrialization, and economic and environmental trade-offs.
Featured lessons include labs on wind energy and electricity, activities on measurement tools and unit conversions, and math challenges on power and work. Students explore energy resources through topics such as coal, oil, and natural gas, completing data sets, simulations, and trade-off exercises that build real-world understanding. Videos such as Introduction to Efficiency reinforce key ideas about energy use and its impacts.
With the Alberta Science 24 curriculum alignment guide, teachers gain a clear framework for lesson planning that meets standards and builds student confidence in applying energy concepts to everyday and global contexts.
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Overview: Energy can be transferred by means of heat and by use of force or distance multipliers called machines. The optimal design of such energy transfer technologies is based upon an understanding of energy transfer, heat and temperature, and force.
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Guiding Question: Why are efforts to promote energy conservation, by improving the efficiency of these technologies, important to society?
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Learning Outcome: Students will gain an understanding that the design of energy transfer technologies also takes into consideration the need for safety and for efficiency as a means of reducing reliance upon nonrenewable energy resources.
Resources
Introduction to Electricity
Suggested Activity: Have students build and test series and parallel circuits using Play-Doh in the hands-on activity.
Introduction to Efficiency – Video
Suggested Activity: Watch the video and explain the importance of energy efficiency and the effect of energy choices on the environment.
Energy Units Math Challenge
Suggested Activity: Assign the math activities to have students learn about energy, power, and work through calculations.
Measurements and Conversions
Suggested Activity: Set up stations to introduce measurement tools and unit conversions, using a reference table that students can keep all year.
Introduction to Coal
Suggested Activity: Assign student groups to complete the data set and the Power Generation Simulation.
Science of Coal
Suggested Activity: Practice Data Analysis as students explore CO2 emissions from coal.
Introduction to Oil
Suggested Activity: Assign student partners to complete the bell ringer, data set, and the Transportation Trade-Offs Hands-On activity.
Introduction to Natural Gas
Suggested Activity: Assign the video, quiz, and data set to learn how natural gas is a key energy resource with environmental challenges.
Developing Media Literacy - Mini-Unit
Suggested Activity: Introduce students to the fundamentals of media literacy through the lens of researching energy topics.