Natural resources

Activities to try

1. 1

   Power your town: an energy-mix decision bench

   Why it works: Renewable vs non-renewable is about whether the source refills on a human timescale, and every source carries an environmental trade-off rather than being simply 'good' or 'bad'.

   1. Allocate an energy mix to keep a town's lights on, dragging in options such as coal, gas, wind, solar and hydro to meet demand.
   2. Watch each choice's consequences update: a coal plant gives steady power, but the sky greys with smoke pollution, invisible CO₂ builds up, and its fuel bar drains toward empty; wind and solar make no air pollution while running but need many units and sag when the weather turns or (for solar) at night; a dam delivers fairly steady power but floods a valley.
   3. Switch the town fully off fossil fuels and observe what changes — the air clears and the fuel gauges stop draining, but far more renewable capacity is needed and output dips with the weather.
   4. State in your own words which sources refill on a human timescale and which run out, and name one environmental trade-off for each source you used.
2. 2

   Obtain and combine: energy-engineer debate

   Why it works: The 4-ESS3-1 practice is obtaining and combining information from multiple sources and weighing competing evidence to justify a position about resource use.

   1. Take the role of an energy engineer, or hold a debate between an energy-company voice and an environmentalist, and gather information about a chosen energy source from more than one source of information.
   2. Combine the information to describe how extracting and using that source affects the environment (for example fossil-fuel air pollution and CO₂, dam or mining habitat loss).
   3. Justify a recommended resource choice by its environmental effects, acknowledging at least one downside of the option you favour.
3. 3

   Sort and match: renewable, non-renewable, and their impacts

   Why it works: Renewable/non-renewable is defined by whether the resource naturally replenishes on a human timescale, which is separate from how clean it is and separate from electricity (a carrier, not a resource).

   1. Sort energy resources (coal, oil, gas, wind, sun, water) into renewable vs non-renewable using the replenishment criterion.
   2. Match each resource to its characteristic environmental effect (e.g. burning fossil fuels → air pollution and CO₂; dams → habitat loss by flooding; surface mining → habitat loss).
   3. Decide the two tricky classification cases: whether nuclear/fissile material is renewable, and whether electricity is a primary resource.
   4. Given a new source not practised, classify it by whether it refills on a human timescale.