Educator Resources

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Online Curriculum Brings Applied Energy Topics to High School Students and Teachers

Energy Excursions is an online curriculum for high school teachers that helps them easily include energy topics in their classroom to meet required content standards; to showcase the integrated nature of STEM using applied energy topics, and to provide their students with online curriculum that covers the various levels of Blooms Taxonomy, culminating in a design challenge for the student. The curriculum gives both teachers and students a window into the interdisciplinary nature of the skills, knowledge and creativity required to provide energy to a global society, as well as an understanding of the challenges that make energy projects exciting and the oversight and considerations that keep these projects safe for humans and their environment.

Robust Courses

Energy Excursions courses focus on engineering/earth sciences related to the energy industry, but integrate other STEM areas such as chemistry, physics and environmental science. Each course contains a number of focused lessons with clearly presented summary, motivation and learning outcomes at the beginning of each lesson. Early lessons in each course guide students on a journey to understand facts, basic concepts and ideas related to the course theme; formative assessments are included along the way to cement fundamentals. Later lessons challenge students to apply higher levels of critical thinking toward the end of the course when case studies and a summative design challenge are presented.

All of our courses are free for students and teachers. No registration is required. To assign a course, simply share links with your students for our courses:

  • In Pursuit of the Safe Well
  • Put it Back
  • How Much Water Does it Take?
  • Energize The Future

Standards Alignments

Academic standards are a benchmark of quality in education. Standards-aligned curriculum helps teachers make selections that focus on what students need to know, understand and be able to do in each high school course. At Energy Excursions we recognize that aligning our curriculum with learning standards makes our online courses more attractive to educators. Our team wanted to design a site that made it easy for teachers to peruse the standards aligned with our Energy Excursions curriculum. That’s why you’ll find easy-to-use, searchable features for each course, lesson and topic page we present as part of our curriculum. Looking for content to cover a particular standard in a specific high school course you teach? Not a problem — you can search for that particular standard (or a group of standards) for your specific high school course within our curriculum. Go to one of our Energy Excursion courses and have fun exploring what all we cover.

Teacher Community

Our teacher community offers free lessons and activities for educators, all aligned with the 2024–2025 TEKS, NGSS and AP Environmental Science Standards. These resources are organized by high school courses and Energy Excursions courses. The community also contains a library of phenomena-based activities that focus on engineering concepts.
 
Our teacher community not only provides classroom resources but also offers asynchronous professional development opportunities. Upon completing a free professional development session, teachers earn Continuing Professional Education (CPE) hours. The University of Texas at Austin is an approved provider of these hours by the Texas Education Agency (TEA).

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