Middle Schoolers Find Earth’s Edge
A school in the Washington, D.C. region has proved that the sky’s the limit when it comes to how much kids can learn from hands-on science projects, reports the Washington Post. Thirteen seventh- and eighth-graders at the Potomac School in McLean, Va., took up science teacher Bill Wiley’s challenge to find a way to take a snapshot of the Earth’s curvature — without spending more than $200.
Wiley figured they had a 60 percent chance of success, but the kids pulled it off. They tethered a cooler to a weather balloon, and inside the cooler they installed a digital camera programmed to take pictures and video several times a minute, as well as a GPS cellphone loaded with tracking software. They also had to figure out how to hang the cooler from the balloon so it was at the correct angle to capture views of the Earth’s edge. “It pushed all their math ability,” Wiley told the paper.
After the device was launched, the weather balloon, as planned, soared to a height at which lack of air pressure caused it to expand and pop. The cooler then floated back to the ground using a small parachute. There was one hitch, the Post reports: It landed several miles away from where the kids had calculated it would. But, using an borrowed iPad, they tracked the phone’s GPS signal to a remote strawberry patch. And, as they hoped, the camera had indeed captured some amazing pictures of the Earth’s curve.
Filed under: K-12 Education News
Tags: Math, Mathematics, Technology, Technology for Learning
