Image courtesy of MSNBC

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Farming for Fuel is a fun, free (for first 50) program designed for 4th – 8th graders. The National Science Center staff will come to your school to provide these FREE 1 hour lessons.

BESC - The DOE BioEnergy Science Center, led by Oak Ridge National Laboratory, is focused on the fundamental understanding and elimination of biomass recalcitrance. The BESC researchers, in conjunction with the US Department of Energy, and The Creative Discovery Museum in Chattanooga, have developed an outreach program called “Farming for Fuel.”

Its main goal is to show how alternative energy sources, with an emphasis on biofuels made from non-food plants, are used for transportation. The activities that the students participate in are hands-on and focus on our current usage of fuels and how we can find and use alternative sources. (These lessons are focused on the use of switchgrass as the crop that is broken down into fermentable sugar-fuel)

The National Science Center can provide more than one lesson a day. The program is designed to be presented to a class size of approximately 25 students. If a school has four 5th grade classes, for example, The National Science Center could set up and then run 4 (approximately one-hour) lessons throughout the day.

Interested?