Nicole Vieira, our manager of schools and youth education, does an in-class test run of an Electrical Safety Week presentation along with BC Hydro spokespersons Jaclyn and Dave.
Our team members to volunteer as in-class presenters at schools
Like the kids who bounce about to mimic charged particles in her in-class workshops, Nicole Vieira has brought a new energy to Electrical Safety Week, set for May 12-16 in B.C.
A few months into her new job as our manager of schools and youth education, the former high school math teacher has enlisted an army of employee volunteers to take wildly interactive activities into classrooms across B.C.
For kids in kindergarten to Grade 3 she's running a Hazard Search and Rescue activity. For Grades 4 through 7, teams will try to guess passwords linked to safety behaviours, or they'll dive into an Escape Room activity where answering clues and riddles will free them from an abandoned power plant. Along the way, they'll learn about how to stay safe around power lines and other electrical hazards, and they'll learn the how and why behind where that electricity comes from.
"You can't just info dump safety or other information on the kids, because it won't stick in their brain," says Vieira. "You have to give them multiple different ways to process that information, and one way is to get them moving. And it's important to talk about the why of electricity and where hydroelectricity comes from. So we build a dam with our bodies, and then we move to gather water in our reservoir, push the water down the penstocks and then move like a spinning turbine.
"And then we're all bouncing around like we're energized electrons. It helps drive home the point that electricity can be dangerous. One teacher told us ‘I think you finally broke through to the kids about why water and electricity don't mix'."
Electrical Safety Week is also about educating outdoor, seasonal workers
Each spring, many new workers take on outdoor, seasonal jobs, with little to no training. An astounding 61% of reported safety incidents that resulted in serious injuries or fatalities involved these seasonal workers, and 80% of incidents resulted from a knowledge gap.
Trades workers, including university students working as window washers, gutter cleaners, and painters, need to know the dangers of our electrical system. If you know someone who does this type of work, including more experienced workers who operate the likes of diggers and excavators, help us spread the word about the 3 keys of electrical safety. And encourage them to sign up for our in-person or online safety training.
A former math teacher, Nicole Vieira is building school programs and content that adheres to the B.C. school curriculum and respects how busy teachers are.
Vieira makes helping teachers a priority
Part of Vieira's job was to help recruit our employees as volunteers for Electrical Safety Week. She was happy to get 217 employees to sign up, including about 60 who will be presenting at schools they have no connection to. That's a change from former years, where employees only presented at schools where their kids, nieces, nephews or friends' kids attended.
There's a chance these three new in-class activities will be reshaped as Power Smart for Schools activities modules for teachers, but only if the feedback by teachers during Electrical Safety Week is overwhelmingly positive. As someone who worked as a math teacher in Delta for five years, then spent a decade working with teachers on Science World programs, she's aware of the time and resource challenges teachers face in B.C.
Vieira also did plenty of R & D for the Electrical Safety Week activities. Her Power Smart for Schools team pre-tested the Hazard Search and Rescue, Password, and Escape Room activities in seven different classrooms. A lot of the activity creation is informed by what she learned delivering the likes of Science World coding training in classrooms across B.C.
"It was so fun and rewarding to get the chance to meet with teachers and give them a polished resource, a polished lesson," she says of her time as a facilitator at Science World. "One thing I remember struggling with as a teacher was having all these great ideas, but not having the time to implement them and iterate on them. You have so much curriculum to fit into a year, so you can only fit in one or two other things throughout the year."
Our Power Smart for Schools resources and activities touch on subjects ranging from energy conservation to the physics of electricity, electrical safety, and Indigenous perspectives on water conservation, salmon and energy generation. They are classroom-ready materials carefully aligned with the B.C. curriculum and often include worksheets or videos to engage the whole class.
Vieira says she has a 15-year relationship working with the B.C. curriculum and knows the documents and evolving competencies well enough to recite them to anyone who might ask. Asked why she quit teaching after five years, she says she believes her skills are best used elsewhere.
"I had always, always, always wanted to be a teacher – that was my one and only life goal," she says. "But I felt like there wasn't enough support in place for teachers. So I made the choice to leave teaching, to see what I could do to get more resources for teachers because there's such a big demand on their time. They're doing a million things at once and you have to be superhuman to be a teacher."