This short video highlights a no-energy solution to indoor lighting in Rockaway, New York, where businesses and homes were impacted by Superstorm Sandy.
Students will learn about "day-lighting," a creative solution that uses reflected sunlight during the day to light buildings, which creates less strain on the power grid and provides more security during power outages.
Teaching Tips
Positives
This video is short and sweet, giving a good example of how engineering can help us adapt as the world faces more frequent and intense storms, more heat waves, and the potential loss of electricity associated with those events.
Additional Prerequisites
Students should know something about electricity, power grids, and blackouts.
Students should be familiar with Superstorm Sandy.
Differentiation
Science, and physics classes could use this video when discussing the properties of light, reflection, and refraction.
This video can help spur student ideas for helping us mitigate and adapt to climate change without using complicated new technologies.
The video presents an initiative that helps to build climate resilience to respond to shocks arising from natural disasters by day-lighting people's businesses. The structural design of the equipment could be replicated anywhere around the world. Although this is a short video, it is recommended for teaching.
Standards
Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS)
ESS3: Earth and Human Activity
3-ESS3-1 Make a claim about the merit of a design solution that reduces the impacts of a weather-related hazard.
ETS1: Engineering Design
HS-ETS1-2 Design a solution to a complex real-world problem by breaking it down into smaller, more manageable problems that can be solved through engineering.
