The electric stroll

Before you begin

• Clipboards would also be useful for this activity, but you can improvise if you don’t have them. You may also need torches, depending on the time or day or year you’re doing this activity.
• Make sure everyone knows they’ll need to have suitable clothes and shoes for walking. Flip flops aren’t the best choice for this activity!
• Plan a route for the group to walk around the local area, starting and ending at your usual meeting place. The route should last about an hour, or however long works best for your group.
• People will be looking for places that use lots of electricity and places that use less electricity, so it’s a good idea to try to walk past bigger buildings like schools or doctors’ surgeries as well as public residential areas.
• Make sure the routes are as safe as possible (especially if you live near busy roads or crowded areas).

Think local

1. Everyone should split into groups of about three or four people.
2. Each team should write down three important things in their local area that need electricity (for example, a doctors’ surgery, a school, and a library). They should also write down three important things that don’t need much electricity (for example, parks, bus stops, and recycling banks).
3. After a few minutes, the teams should take it in turns to read out their ideas.
4. The person leading the activity should show everyone the map of the local area. Can anyone spot anything that uses a lot of electricity that no one thought of?

5. The person leading the activity should explain that electricity comes from central power stations connected by the national power grid. It can travel a long way to reach the place it’s needed.
6. Everyone should think about what might happen if there’s a problem at the power grid, or somewhere along the journey between the grid and the community.
7. Each group should think about which places should get electricity first if there’s not enough to go around, then write them down.

Look for lights

1. Each group should get a pen or pencil, a new piece of paper, or a clipboard (if they have them).
2. Each group should split their piece of paper into three vertical columns. They should label the first ‘Street’, the second ‘Building’, and the third ‘Power used’.

3. Everyone should set out on the route around their community.

4. Every time they turn onto a new street, each team should write its name in the ‘Street’ column. If it doesn’t have a name, they should briefly describe it instead.
5. On each street, everyone should look at a mixture of buildings. They should write the name of the buildings in the ‘Buildings’ column. Each team should chat about why each of the buildings might be important to the community. They might want to jot down a few words to remind them what they talked about.
6. Everyone should see roughly how many lights are switched on in each building. They should make a note of the number for each building in the third column. Some places will have their lights on all night, for example, hospitals.

7. Once everyone’s back at the meeting place, they should share their findings. Which streets and buildings had the most lights on? Which had the least? Were any using too much electricity, or were the lights too important to be switched off?