Camp Hydro: Building a Wilderness Water Wheel

This project starts with a fantasy story. Imagine you're camping, out in the wilderness somewhere. Like anyone heading out into the woods to take a break from the hectic pace of our modern technological society, you've brought your cellphone with you. Unfortunately, you forgot that there are no power outlets in the wildnerness, and you don't have any way to charge your phone's battery. Fortunately, there's a stream near your campsite, and you have the supplies you'll need to build an improvised electric-generating water wheel! Maybe if you get it built quickly enough, you won't have to get down to the real business of enjoying nature.

The Project

What you're actually going to be doing, for this project, is designing the water wheel for a small hydroelectric generation system. Since the STEM Explorer isn't really in the middle of nowhere, you'll be doing this in a parametric CAD system called Onshape, and we'll be manufacturing your design with one of our 3D printers. When this is done, we'll test your design out in our fake "stream" and see how much electricity it generates.

The Standards

This project is designed to meet Michigan's HS-PS3-3 and HS-ETS1-2 science and engineering standards, and many of ISTE's Student standards. For more information, you can read our standards summary document, Michigan's standards document, and the ISTE's standards page.

The Rubric

The best design won't just have to be good at generating electricity. It's also important to have a water wheel that's durable (so it lasts a long time) and that uses as little material as possible (so it's not too expensive to make). You'll also need to be able to work with your teammates, and understand your test results well enough to explain them to others. You can see the full rubric that your teacher will use to grade your project here.

Important Links

• Onshape's website contains everything you need to do your CAD work, including of course the Onshape application.
• You'll also want to refer to our Onshape tutorial videos to help you learn how to make models. They're all going to be important for your project.
• Introductory Activities
• Energy transformations worksheet
• Introduction for teachers and administrators
• Sign-up form for teachers

Step by Step

• The STEM Explorer team will deliver an introductory lecture first, to get you started with the project. We'll try to come to your school in-person to kick off the project if that's possible, but if not we'll try to do a live lecture with videoconferencing technology, or in the worst case ask you to watch our prerecorded video lecture.
• Next, you'll need to learn some fundamentals about energy; the STEM Explorer team will provide your teacher some lesson plans on this subject, explaining exactly the stuff you need to be successful in this project.
• By the second week of the project, you should be ready to start learning parametric CAD modelling with Onshape. We've created some Onshape tutorials for you to watch, and the STEM Explorer team will of course be available to help you.
• Before you start modelling in Onshape, you should do some brainstorming with your team first. We recommend you draw some ideas on paper first, so you know what you need to model in Onshape. Your teacher may want to collect these drawings.
• Now, you should finally be ready to create your water wheel in Onshape. Your whole team should participate here, so you have the best possible chance of completing what you want. The STEM Explorer staff will be available to help you out if you get stuck.
• Once you've finished your model, you should make a snapshot of it and submit it to the STEM Explorer team. We will then manufacture everyone's water wheels with our 3D printers; this part could take a long time, because we'll usually have a lot of things to print.
• Finally, we'll get your designs tested to see how well they work. Depending on what's possible, we may come to your school to try them out, let you watch us test them live over videoconference, or record video of the tests and send them to you along with the test data. How you'll wrap up your project after you have your test results is up to your teacher.