Oklahoma Renewable Energy Education Program Survey on STEM Education and Shake Flashlights

Stem Education Flashlights advance student learning.

EcocentricNow is proud to partner with the Oklahoma Renewable Energy Education Program to strengthen its hands-on STEM experiences and curriculum. ECN staff recently had the pleasure of interviewing OREEP representative, Tara Baker, on the importance of STEM education and how ECN’s innovative shake flashlight technology has been an asset to their statewide program.

STEM stands for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics. STEM is a broad term used to group together several academic disciplines at every grade level, from early education to post-secondary education.

Why do you feel STEM education is important? 

       “Students need to learn how to problem solve and think about the process they need to go through to develop solutions. STEM does that along with showing students how different subjects all work together.”

Sierra Club demonstrating the physics behind the 40-B shake flashlight

What type of institutions or programs do you partner with?

“We partner with Oklahoma Chapter Sierra Club, Green Schools (Statewide program), and OREC (Oklahoma Renewable Energy Council) a statewide group.”

Where do you see the future of STEM education heading? How can STEM education be improved from your perspective? 

      “It is already a class in some schools, but I see it being expanded to include more subjects. To be improved – expanding beyond basic math skills such as measurements or finding an area. To build things you have to be able to measure. Just showing how we use these things in everyday life.”

How have you integrated hands-on learning with ECN products into your lessons? 

   “We have a lesson on how electricity is made using a generator, how a generator is used in a wind turbine and in hydroelectric plants. So the (ECN) shake flashlight is very important in showing how a magnet going through a wire coil produces energy.”

Aside from our shake flashlight, what additional products would benefit your organization’s support of STEM education?

“We use solar panels and mini motors that we use as generators for wind turbines and can use those for hydropower. We are always looking at products that might fit our use.”

What do you like about purchasing merchandise from EcoCentricNow? 

“ECN is easy and they are great to work with. We were offered a shake flashlight that we could take apart to demonstrate and the teachers love that. They don’t want all the flashlights to come apart but having one as a demo is great. It really helps to see inside better so that students get a better understanding of what is happening.”

The #1 shake flashlight for hands-on STEM education activities is the Shake Light 40-B Flashlight, this technology uses shake action to charge the flashlight’s magnetic charging system.

LED shake flashlights, like the 40-B, effectively demonstrate a variety of “renewable energy” physics concepts including magnetism, Newtonian Relativity, Faraday’s Law, Snell’s Law, and more. For details download your free copy of our NightStar Physics Guide.

Shake Light 40-B Flashlight enhances STEM learning by demonstrating meaningful and inspiring technologies which focus on engineering challenges and solutions requiring student initiative and creativity. We are proud to partner with national organizations, big and small, like OREEP. If you’d like more information about how to incorporate shake flashlight technology into your STEM education curriculum reach out to us at sales@ecocentricnow.com.

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