Science Probes For Data Collection!

Funded Aug 22, 2018

My 8th grade students are learning about weather in our Earth Science unit this year. They have been learning how heat makes the air less dense and therefore rise. They also learned that as air rises it cools down and the water vapor condenses while the cooler air becomes more dense and sinks. They saw in an experiment that the convection of warm air rising and cooler air sinking causes winds. This will lead them to see how convection also causes changes in air pressure and that can lead to sunny and clear weather with high pressure systems or it can lead to stormy rainy weather in low pressure systems. In order to understand how weather patterns form all over the Earth, students learned how the sun's radiation affects different parts of the Earth. That's where the light sensors that were purchased with your donation came in very handy. Students were able to see the intensity of the sun's light decrease the farther north or south you get from the equator! As students moved the sensor north and south along our model Earth, they got to see the light intensity recorded by the light sensor decrease the closer they got to the poles! They learned that the air on the ground heats up when the sun's radiation is absorbed into the Earth's surface and converts into heat energy, so students were able to determine that the less intense the light, the less heat was being generated at those parts of the Earth.

Students were excited when I told them we were able to purchase sensors to collect data so they could see the phenomena for themselves instead of just reading about it in our book. The conversations that students engaged in while the light sensor was being used and afterward as we looked at the graphs were very enlightening. I heard students show understanding of what the graphs were showing and how that explained why it gets colder as we move away from the equator. Students admitted that they had always known that it's warmer at the equator because it gets more direct sunlight, but actually seeing how the light intensity decreased as they physically moved the light sensor made it more real for them. The excitement continued even after they were done using the sensors.

By seeing how light intensity decreases as we move north or south of the equator, students are ready to understand why we have seasons. The next step is to use the light sensors with our Earth model to see how the Earth's tilt affects the light intensity. Students will see first hand why we are approaching winter right now in the Pacific Northwest! Your donation also helped us purchase a force plate sensor that students will use for force experiments on our upcoming physics unit and the heart rate sensors will be used at the end of the year for a unit on how our body uses food.

The sensors we now have because of your generous donation will help Chimacum kids learn Science in ways that they could not have learned Science before and we will be using these for many years to come.”

With gratitude,

Mr. Gonzalez