Each school year, we choose to develop activities on topics relevant to each age category. This time, from September 2023 to March 2024, we have developed three one-day workshop scenarios: Energy Detectives for 3rd grade, My School’s Energy for middle school, and Energy.Home.Neighborhood. for high school.

The activities are designed to be conducted in classrooms, guided exclusively by a teacher. Students acquire new knowledge, skills, and attitudes about the connection between the built environment (their school or a generic school, a generic home, but also the neighborhood, locality, region) and the production and consumption of energy.

The goal is not for students to reproduce definitions but to experience and understand that:

• Energy consumption in our buildings and neighborhoods can be reduced – by making new arrangements and constructions that are more efficient, as well as by increasing the thermal insulation of existing buildings (retrofit).
• Our buildings and arranged public or private spaces can also produce, not just consume energy – sun, wind, temperature differences (heat pumps) can be sources of alternative energy for both electricity production and heating or cooling the air in the rooms we use, without decreasing the comfort of those using them, but rather increasing it.
• We are interconnected in space – energy distribution networks connect us (producers and consumers, prosumers and distributors, etc.), and the quality of these networks conditions our possibilities to produce energy from alternative sources.

To integrate these ideas, knowledge alone is not enough; practical activities and discussions are needed to define the common interest regarding energy and the built environment. Therefore, a series of worksheets, boards, interior arrangement situation cards – all these teaching materials guide students through investigative activities (primary school), an intergenerational role-playing game (high school), or calculations of electricity consumption for their school, and decisions to be made in a design project theme for a retrofit intervention for a generic school (middle school).

The materials to support the workshops in the classroom are available for free – in romanian, made possible with the help of a grant from Iceland, Liechtenstein, and Norway, through the EEA Grants 2014 – 2021, as part of the project “Energy literacy for an efficient and sustainable Romania. Transversal knowledge transfer and awareness raising between Romania and Norway.” (ELES)