Electric Vehicle Expo’s Family Zone Fun Recap

During last month’s Electric and Hydrogen Vehicle Expo, the Energy Systems research group at the University of Alberta (UofA) was proud to operate the Family Zone—a place full of fun learning activities for kids attending the event.

Image above: The energy quilt created by the children attending the EV Expo. Kids drew what they pictured for the cars of the future or what they imagined their energy future to look like. Over 100 kids added to the quilt. (Photo by Future Energy Systems)

Many among the 6,000 Expo attendees were children getting their first glimpse of the automotive technologies that, while new to many of us, will be the norm for them. When those of us who grew up with hybrids—or before hybrids!—are telling tales to future generations about how all vehicles once needed “oil changes”, the young people who attended the Expo will be shopping for cars with longer-lasting batteries, better fuel cells, or more advanced charging systems.

At the UofA, hundreds of researchers and students are helping make that future a reality. New battery technologies, smarter grids to enable safe and fast charging, and new materials for better hydrogen fuel cells and energy storage are all being developed in our labs, and we have some idea of how the world will look when they’re ready to be put out on the market.

But predictions we make based on these technologies are only part of the picture; the future just isn’t decided by the tools we invent, but by how people choose to use them. That’s why it’s so important—and so fun—to ask children to think about what’s important to them, as they learn and grow towards becoming our society’s decision makers.

Encouraging kids to imagine the future is the purpose of the Family Zone’s centerpiece activity. After witnessing the power of static electricity, building their own electrical circuits, constructing pinwheels and other renewable energy crafts, completing sustainability puzzles, or guessing which energy sources provided the most electricity in Alberta in 2019, kids were asked to unleash their imaginations.

With a simple piece of paper and either crayons or colored pencils, every child was given the chance to draw a picture of the future they envision for energy, or for cars. Each drawing—except for a few that kids loved so much they wanted to keep—was pinned up on a bulletin board, creating a quilt-like collage of many imagined futures.

We learned a lot. Flying cars are as popular now as ever (no UofA researcher is currently working on that technology, so we can’t comment on whether we’re any more likely to see it in than viewers of The Jetsons were!) and there were a fair number of appearances by aliens (we can’t rule that out either!).

A theme common among every picture, no matter how it imagined our energy future, was optimism. Transitioning our world to new energy technologies is not an easy prospect, and we have to grapple with many issues—technical, environmental, social, and economic—before we can complete our journey.

Kids these days are growing up surrounded by discussions of that transition. So while they worry for their future climate—and we worry for them— they also hope for an amazing future, and that hope can fuel all of us as surely as electricity or hydrogen can.

In their optimism we can find continued motivation for our work as researchers, and for our behaviour as citizens of Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, and the world. Everything we do can make a difference—and if we’re lucky, might even land us a flying car one day.

For now, the Energy Systems research teams at the UofA are hard at work tackling technical, environmental, and societal questions that will help us take the next steps in the energy transition—and the steps after those steps. A long journey lies ahead, but with every new student tackling a new research project, we get a little closer.

Image above: Picture created by Kaitlin Pylypa, illustrator of The Energy Adventures of Tommy and Remi, a book series developed by Energy Systems at the UofA to explore energy and climate change with kids.

And we’ll always be delighted to take the time to join our partners at the City of Edmonton as they create exciting events like the Electric and Hydrogen Vehicle Expo. We send our thanks to the organizers who did tremendous work putting the event together, and thank the thousands of people who stopped by the Family Zone to meet our researchers, and share their visions for our energy future.

This post was submitted by the University of Alberta’s Future Energy Systems team. If you live in Edmonton and have a climate change story to tell, let us know! Your story could be shared here too.