Field Trip Week

It has been a few weeks since this happened, but I was able to put together a field trip for some of the students.

I had the students come for an informal conference put on by two departments; Atmospheric Oceanic and Space Sciences Department (AOSS) and the Geology Department. The conference is called the Michigan Geophysical Union (MGU). Graduate students and undergraduate students are provided this opportunity to present their research in poster form to a "friendly" audience. This was going to be the best way to show the students what all goes on in my department. The students would also be able to talk to other graduate students and interact with a bunch of people they normally don't see.

After the MGU I had arranged for one of the AOSS professors to give a presentation. Prof. Perry Samson came in to do this job. He was perfect. He talked about tornadoes and his experiences as a tornado chaser.

This field trip consisted of 25 students ranging from 10th to 12th graders selected from several of Mr. Ambrose's classes. For the majority of the students, they seemed engaged and enjoying everything they could. We had no issues with discipline, which I have to admit was nice and surprising. MGU was very interesting to them, because a lot of them did not know that they could do all this with science. There were presenters on pollution in specific areas, landing the Phoenix mission on Mars, environment around Io (moon of Jupiter), flying instruments in space, studying dinosaur's teeth, and lots more. I had each student visit at least 6 posters and fill out a questionnaire. The questions were: The title of the poster; What is the question you are trying to solve; What High School classes could I take to help myself understand and possible work with this stuff; How did you get into science, specifically the subject you are working on now. This was really good for both YHS students and the presenters. The presenters had to work really hard to explain their research in simple terms. Of course the students loved Prof. Perry Samson's talk. He was showing videos of when he and other students were out in the field tornado chasing. The last thing, I had some fellow students come in so the students to ask them questions. This went really well. Students asked them: Was there any subject you did not like in your education but you had to take?; What is the difference between undergraduate and graduate students?; When did you know this is what you wanted to pursue?... etc. There were a lot of great questions.

Overall the field trip was very successful. The majority of the students loved it and might have learned something new.

Week ?

This week I gave a quick lecture to the chemistry classes about pressure and temperature measurements on places we can't physically go.

In the last few weeks the students have been learning the relationships between pressure, volume, and temperature. The unit ended on learning the ideal gas law (PV=nRT). I was trying to show the connection between what they were learning in class to the outer world. I don't think I succeeded. In my field and any other fields dealing with atmospheres these equations are used all the time. The students were mainly quiet and took notes, but it wasn't anything exciting to them. Partly I had a hard time figuring out a way to show them besides just telling them I do use this all the time and showing some lengthy derivation. To try to capture a little more excitement I went into some details on how spacecrafts got the information (temperature, density, and pressure), they just were more interested in everything else in our solar system besides what I was trying to talk about. It was good to see excitement but it wasn't toward the main topic. Oh well. =)

Less then a few weeks I will be giving another talk describing their field trip and some concepts that might help them understand what these graduate students are doing.