Centennial Campus Middle School and NC State University build connections
May 21, 2003 - Drought and the impact of the Gulf Stream on North Carolina weather were the issues four Centennial Campus Middle School eighth-graders worked on this year as part of internships in the State Climate Office.
 Students Jon Bolding, Ben Reid, Nick Tarleton and Robbie Wilson (L to R) served as interns with Associate State Climatologist Ryan Boyles. |
The Wake County school and North Carolina State University, where the climate office is located, hope to create similar opportunities for more students as they strengthen connections between the Wake County magnet school and university programs.
At the first of the school year, the climate office offered several students the chance to visit on Thursday afternoons. Eighth-grade science teachers Laura Webb Smith and Katie Sabino determined students Nick Tarleton, Robbie Wilson, Jon Bolding, and Ben Reid would benefit from the enrichment opportunity.
"We try to find opportunities in the classroom for real-world experiences, but this is better than we can provide," said Webb Smith. "The students are in a setting with professionals who have access to real data which affects our weather every day. They can ask the scientific questions and learn the approach through real scientists to investigate these questions and produce results that they can bring back to school and present to the other students."
Associate State Climatologist Ryan Boyles put the students to work studying the office's Web site. They made several recommendations, including the addition of a glossary that was added in a redesign of the Web site.
Boyles also worked with the students on projects they took to the regional science fair and Geographic Information Systems conference.
Ben and Jon were interested in the Gulf Stream.
"We looked at how the Gulf Stream affects the North Carolina climate and the frontogenesis equation which describes how quickly fronts form over a certain distance," said Ben. "Coastal fronts in North Carolina play a big factor in our weather. It's the reason we sometimes get snow and sometimes get freezing rain. It's because of the intensity of the front. Cold air gets trapped between the coastal front and the mountains, and the closer to the coast you get, the less likely it is to be snow and the more likely it is to be freezing rain or sleet."
Nick and Robbie were interested in drought.
"We thought the drought in North Carolina was getting worse, but when we looked at the data, we found that it was actually getting better," said Robbie.
Boyles said he was impressed by the way the students absorbed basic concepts of the math and statistics used in climate study and then applied the concepts to their projects.
"They looked for information on the Web and looked at actual data: climate data or offshore marine data where they looked for relationships," Boyles said. "They were working in Excel and other software packages to analyze the data and find relationships in the data. It was basic scientific analysis. Then after they completed their analysis, we spent a lot of time making sure they could package it in such a way that it make sense to the public. Science is not just doing research, but it's also communicating the research."
"According to Mr. Boyles, 90 percent of research is collecting and formatting your data and 10 percent is drawing conclusions," said Nick.
The project Ben and Jon prepared received an Honorable Mention award at the Wake County science fair and advanced to the regional fair. Their report has been posted on the Climate Office's Web site at http://www.nc-climate.ncsu.edu/education/ccms/2003/ben_jon/. The project Nick and Robbie have been working on will be added to the Web site by the end of the school year.
When the middle school opened in 2000, Principal Ken Branch
was excited about the connections he looked forward to building
with the university.
"We want to take this beyond a guest-speaker kind of
mentality," said Branch. "As our teachers do their
instructional planning, they will be looking for places where
we can naturally link what they are doing instructionally
with a resource at NC State. And this is across their campus.
Our students have access to their facilities, as far as visiting
the libraries, observing experiments, going to the National
Weather Service on the campus, going to the climate center,
going to the vet school. Our kids will have access to those
facilities as they are related to what they are doing instructionally
in the classroom, taking the whole idea of field trips to
a new level."
This school year, the middle school and university connected on a number of projects including:
- NC State students have visited the middle school for classroom observation;
- NC State students have served as one-on-one tutors for middle-school students;
- NC State math instructors have worked with middle-school math students in lessons on probability;
- NC State professor taught an astronomy class for 12 middle-school science students;
- NC State and middle-school faculty have planned and conducted summer engineering camps;
- NC State students and volunteers have assisted in an afterschool 4-H program;
- NC State faculty and students have worked with middle-school science teachers and students to make GIS maps of the school campus to study changes over time;
- NC State Encore program students, who are aged 50 and older, were interviewed by middle-school students for an oral history project. They will meet at the middle school at 10:45 a.m. on Thursday, May 22 to celebrate their project's success;
- NC State faculty worked with middle-school physics students on an amusement park project, using their physics studies to make small-scale amusement park rides. The final work session is at 12:30 p.m. on Tuesday, May 27.
Centennial Campus Middle School will hold an awards ceremony at 8 a.m. on Thursday, May 29 for the student interns. Boyles plans to attend to recognize the four students for their work in the State Climate Office.
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