| Good Science From Kids |
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Some special science programs involve—and excite—kids
It's always a good time to think of something special for your kids—or your students—to do. How about getting together with real scientists to collect valuable data for climate studies?
A growing number of programs enlist schoolchildren to perform useful observations and share their data with the global research community. In May 1999, people from many of these programs met in Boston (with the rest of the American Geophysical Union) to present their work at a special AGU session on "Student and Science Partnerships." The programs they described are still going strong as of mid-2003.
Forrest Mims, amateur scientist extraordinaire, was one speaker. He cited a long-standing tradition of using amateur observers in science—astronomy and bird studies are two familiar examples. Mims is having schoolchildren build and use very inexpensive light meters to measure the sunlight where they live. This measurement, properly done, is a precise gauge of the amount of haze in the atmosphere. The kids' data is sent in over the Internet to become part of the great database of atmospheric haze that numerical models of climate use. Mims describes his Solar Photometer Atmospheric Network (SPAN) at the HAZE-SPAN site. See if his enthusiasm doesn't rub off.
SPAN is just one project of GLOBE (Global Learning and Observations to Benefit the Environment), a worldwide network linking students, teachers, and scientists in 80 countries. Their activities extend from the soil to the sky, and millions of observations have been collected via the Internet from schoolkids. Visit the First MUC-a-Thon page for an example.
The NASA space agency is enlisting student observers in its CERES campaign, a long-term research project measuring the whole planet's cloud cover by satellite. Because the satellite can be fooled by bright snow and other conditions, it's good to have someone on the ground check what's really there at the time the satellite passes overhead. Hence the S'COOL (Students Cloud Observations On-Line) program, described succinctly by one class: "Why are our heads in the clouds? We are helping NASA with a REAL project! . . . We go outside to observe the sky and report via the Internet to NASA." S'COOL staffer Carolyn Green reported to the AGU on the project's first two years of success.
And then there's TERC, the Cambridge (Massachusetts) agency that has been bringing the science and education communities together since 1965. At the AGU meeting, science educator Daniel Barstow described TERC's collaboration with the Jet Propulsion Lab to enlist students in studying the enormous body of data from the current Mars spacecraft missions. (That effort went online in June 2003 at MarsQuest Online.) The Internet has brought the thrill of space exploration to everyone, he said, and now "students and hobbyists will be able to work directly with planetary scientists in authentic research."
These programs are just a few of those that were presented to the AGU. Others offer mentoring to teachers, or guidance for children to practice science in simple, realistic ways. These approaches are each a valuable part of a crucial task for world society—bringing all people the gift of science.
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TERC's Daniel Barstow wrote an insightful essay on "The Richness of Two Cultures," science and education, for a groundbreaking conference on student-scientist partnerships a couple years ago. Go here for the whole report.
