Test your skills at being a mining engineer. We’ll dig chocolate chip cookies instead of rock!

Materials

• 2 chocolate chip cookies (you’ll need 3 if you’re planning to eat one!)
• toothpicks

Instructions

1. Take one cookie and pretend it is an environment in which a great source of energy has been located (chocolate chips).

2. Try to predict how many chips you can extract from this environment.

3. Using a toothpick, extract as many chips as possible in 2 minutes and pile them to one side.

4. Count the chips you recovered and compare this with the number of chips you predicted.

5. Now study the impact of your mining on your "cookie" environment. What do you think would happen if this were a real coalmine? What if animals and plants lived above the coal deposits? What might happen to them after the mining has taken place?

6. Now think of ways to mine the second cookie with less damage to the environment.

7. Take the second cookie and mine it using the ideas you came up with to protect the cookie environment. Pile the new chips to one side.

8. Compare the two piles of chips. How did you do the second time?

Chances are, you got less chocolate chips the second time because you tried to do less harm to the environment.

Real life mining engineers have to try to get as much from the ground as they can, while at the same time limiting the amount of damage they do to the Earth. You’ve learned that extracting energy resources can damage the Earth. It can be very difficult to repair damage that has been done to the environment by mining activities.

(Source: Association of Professional Engineers and Geoscientists of British Columbia)