Batteries Labs

The first lab consists of showing students a board with a bunch of different types of batteries on it. Typical questions include:

1. Have you seen any of these batteries around your home?
2. Which ones can you recharge?
3. What happens when the energy in an AA battery runs out? What do you do with it?
4. How do you know when a battery does not have any power left?
5. What are the two ends of the AA battery called? Why is positive and negative important?

For older participants, you can go into more detailed concepts such as current, voltage, battery ratings, battery weights and the risks of starting a fire with some types of batteries such as LiPo batteries.

We have sample discussions and lesson plans here:

1. 5th Grade Discussion
2. 9th Grade Lesson Plan (1-hour)
3. 11th Grade Discussion

Generating New Lesson Plans for Different Grade Levels

You can generate your own dialogs and lesson for different grade levels by just uploading the image of the board to ChatGPT and give the following prompts.

Three Minute Discussion

When students come up to the table we want the discussion to last about 2-3 minutes followed by some questions. This means that we want the discussion to be about 1-page long. We can then tape these dialogs to the back of the boards for the volunteers to use.

Create a one-page dialog explaining the batteries in this photo.

One Hour Lesson Plan Prompt

Please create a detailed _one-hour-long lesson plan_ for a 9th-grade robotics class about batteries based on the photo above. You can assume all the students will have access to these batteries as well as wire, motors, battery meters and volt-ohm meters. Please return your response as a single raw markdown file.