Thanks for Connecting With Us at UtSTA 2026
A Friday in Layton, a conference center full of Utah science teachers, and Play-Doh circuits lighting up. We had a great time at UtSTA 2026! If you started your morning at the keynote, caught a workshop, or stopped by our booth, thank you for spending part of your day with us.
Dr. Scott Tinker’s Keynote: Completely Factual Isn’t Factually Complete
This year’s keynote hit close to home: Switch Energy Alliance founder Dr. Scott Tinker took the main stage with a talk called “Energy: Seeking Civil Dialogue and Factual Completeness.” The idea at its center is one you can hand straight to your students. A statement can be completely factual without being factually complete. Wind and solar are the fastest-growing energy sources in the world. It’s also true that together they supply less than 5% of global energy. Global energy security is improving. It’s also true that roughly 85% of people don’t yet have secure energy. Scott paired statements like these throughout the talk, from demand and physics to economics, security, and environment, and asked the room to help students learn to hold both halves at once.
More than 500 educators filled the room for the morning keynote, and Dr. Tinker kept them with him the whole way. He found a way to work in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, a show of hands, and the number 42. His closing message to that room: your role is vital.
Several of you asked for the slides after the talk. They’re posted here: Download Dr. Tinker’s UtSTA keynote slides
Real-World Lessons: Our UtSTA 2026 Workshops
Both workshops filled their rooms, and the Play-Doh circuits session ran out of seats. Our Teacher Advisory Council member April Thompson, who also serves on the UtSTA board, led them:
Zap! Squish! Light It Up! Play-Doh Circuits for Grades 4-12
Conductive dough, LEDs, and our Introduction to Electricity lesson, turning conductivity, resistance, and series versus parallel circuits into something students can hold in their hands.
Fuel for Thought: Teaching Energy Tradeoffs and Transformations
Two of our most-used activities, paired: Energy Sources Activity Stations, where participants weighed the benefits and limitations of coal, wind, solar, natural gas, and more, and Understanding Energy Transformations, tracing how energy changes form on its way to the light switch.
Everything We Brought to UtSTA, in One Place
If you want the full table’s worth without the trip back to Layton, we built a collection page for this conference. It has the full lessons and activity guides behind both workshops, plus everything else we featured at the booth, all on one page. Browse the UtSTA conference collection
New to Switch Classroom?
The question we heard most at the booth: what do you have for upper elementary and middle school? Our Introduction to lessons (energy, electricity, solar, wind, and more) are written to be accessible across grade levels, and like everything we make, they’re free and editable. If UtSTA was your first time meeting us, that goes for the whole library: Switch Classroom, a program of Switch Energy Alliance, creates free lesson plans and activities on energy and environmental science, built and tested by teachers in real classrooms. Browse it all at switchclassroom.org and take whatever’s useful.
Stay Connected
One thing we mentioned at the booth is worth repeating here: our free PD lineup continues this fall with a webinar on the Impacts of Agriculture on December 1st. Future conferences, new lessons, seasonal activities, and professional learning events all land in our monthly newsletter first.
Subscribe to the Switch Classroom newsletter
Thanks again for a great day in Layton. Keep sustaining the spark.