Schedule
Note: the following descriptions were taken from our proposal for this project. The described activities are subject to change, as needed.
We will serve breakfast 20 minutes before every Saturday meeting, and lunch at the end of the day.
Activity Day 0: Orientation Meeting
Towson University faculty will meet participating Academy students, their parents/guardians, and teachers to discuss goals and provide an overview of this project. Parents/guardians will be provided with practice interview questions to prepare their students for the mock interviews on Activity Day 6.
Activity Day 1: The Local Environment and its Impact on the Health of the Chesapeake Bay
The first activity day is designed to be an exciting introduction to the program, act as a recruitment drive, and to give the staff and student participants a chance to meet one another. This exercise is a reprise of a similar activity successfully completed in September 2008 during Geomatics I. Due to this activity’s popularity, we will run it again as a recruitment tool, with a mixture of new and old students. Each of the returning students from previous Geomatics programs will be asked to recruit an additional friend from the GEAR-UP cohort. This particular activity is especially well-suited as a recruitment device, because it can run with a large group people and can be easily expanded to cope with varying numbers of participants.
The group will meet at FHHS and walk to Beaverdam Creek, located in the Jesse J. Warr Jr. Neighborhood Park, across the street from FHHS. There, Dr. Roberge will describe how Beaverdam Creek links their neighborhood, Fairmount Heights, to the Chesapeake Bay. Dr. Roberge and the other project leaders will then split the students up and lead them in a series of environmental activities that are organized in a round-robin circuit. The purpose of each activity is to collect environmental data that will be turned in at the end of the day and pooled for later analysis. Activities include stream water sampling, measuring stream discharge, and investigating the impact of the Urban Heat Island phenomenon on surface temperatures. An activity involving the use of Global Positioning Systems will gather spatial data for use in a reenactment of Eratosthenes’ famous attempt to measure the circumference of the Earth. In the case of inclement weather, we will conduct the activity day two activities (Symmetry, Translations, & Tessellations), and will move the field activity to day two.
Activity Day 2: Using Rockets and Balloons for Atmospheric Sounding Profiles.
Students will use the Global Positioning System (GPS) data that they collected from Activity One in this day’s activities. First, students will download the ‘trails’ they created earlier while walking in the park, and place these against maps of the park and school. This activity will serve as an introduction to mapping and GPS, and will help orient students to local maps and aerial photography.
Twice every day, approximately 800 airports around the world release weather balloons into the upper atmosphere to collect atmospheric sounding profiles. These radiosondes record the temperature, relative humidity, atmospheric pressure, and wind speed at different elevations. These data are essential for predicting the stability of the atmosphere, a major factor in determining the likelihood and strength of storms. In this activity, students will record temperature, relative humidity, and barometric pressure at different elevations using ordinary model rockets and a tethered helium balloon. Students will calculate the height of the rockets and the balloon using the geometric principle of ‘Angle-Side-Angle’: students will stand at either end of a 100m baseline and measure the azimuth and angle to the highest part of the rockets’ arc, and to the balloon. These height data will be integrated with the barometric pressure, temperature, acceleration, and relative humidity data. The data collected on this day will be examined on site, and in detail on Activity Day 7 (Functions upon Functions).
The rockets and tethered balloon will be operated only by the staff, who will follow the safety guidelines issued by the National Association of Rocketry. These activities adhere to all relevant regulations issued by the Federal Aviation Administration.
Educational and Career Plans: In the second part of this activity, students will learn about resources they can use to plan their education and how to set realistic career goals and do long-term planning. Students will also learn about the value of internships for earning money, choosing a future career, and preparing for college. All students will receive an application form for the Internship Finder Service (described above).
Activity Day 3: Nations of the World and Demographic Data
Weighted averages are used throughout demography and the social sciences to help find averages among groups of countries whose populations or land areas differ widely in size. In spite of their widespread use, high school and even college students are unfamiliar with them. In this exercise, students will download world demographic data from the internet and load it into an Excel spreadsheet. They will then use Excel to create weighted averages for birth rates, death rates, infant mortality rates, and per capita GDP for the major world regions. Students then create simple graphs to examine the relationship among different variables such as income and infant mortality. In addition to practicing math skills, this activity will provide some experience using business software, and in identifying reliable sources of data from intergovernmental agencies.
Cartograms and Demography (Dr. Shore) Cartograms are maps in which geographic areas are redrawn so that they are proportional to some demographic variable, rather than land area. First, a Robinson projection world map will be displayed, and major world regions will be discussed. Next, a cartogram of the world by population will be displayed to discuss the idea of cartograms. This will be created two ways: by computer and by hand. These will be accompanied by a table that shows percent of world population for each continent. For the hand-created one, 100 squares will be divided up corresponding to population percentages, and then recomposed into shapes that mimic the actual geographic shapes. They will be arranged on a poster board in approximate locations to mimic the map of the world. This is the procedure that student groups will use for a demographic variable of their choice that they will then research and for which they will create a cartogram. Each group will present their cartogram and explain their interpretation.
Activity Day 4: Symmetry, Translations, & Tessellations
Mathematics plays a major role in Islamic art, from tessellation of tiles to patterns in architectural dimensions. Students will be given manipulatives (triangles, rectangles, pentagons, hexagons, and octagons) and asked to determine which of these shapes can tessellate a plane (completely cover a piece of paper leaving no gaps). Students will discuss and discover geometrical characteristics of those polygons that do tessellate the plane. Next, students will explore examples of tessellations of various combinations of different types of polygons in Islamic art from the Alhambra in Granada (last Moorish stronghold in Spain) and Morocco. The patterns of tessellations of the Alhambra motivated M. C. Escher in his art of tessellations of objects. Using Escher’s work as a guide, students will use geometrical transformations (translations, reflections, and rotations) to discover how to create modified shapes, no longer restricted to polygons, from triangles and hexagons that still tessellate the plane. Finally, students will explore the patterns in architectural dimensions found throughout the buildings of the Alhambra.
Activity Day 5: Discrete Mathematics / Dress-up day
Discrete mathematics has many contemporary mathematics topics that students are not generally exposed to in the course of taking the traditional sequence of algebra, geometry and Pre-Calculus. One activity day will be devoted to classic discrete mathematics problems such as the four-color map theorem and the Bridges of Konigsburg, which relate to vertex-edge graphs and networks, topics in graph theory. These problems offer an opportunity for hands-on work while engaged in true problem solving tasks that are integrated with geography-related contexts.
Dress-up Day and Business Power Lunch: As a part of a continuing dialog on workplace skills and professionalism, students will be asked to dress appropriately for a business interview on this day. This will lead into discussions on appropriate work clothes, clothes for ‘casual days’ in offices, and how standards vary by profession, such as at law offices, banks, and in the tech industries. Students will travel to a nearby restaurant, where they will eat lunch in a slightly more formal sit-down setting. Students will learn how to make a great first impression, appropriate etiquette for professional dining, and how to conduct themselves during a formal dining setting for business. During this meal, students will be mixed into new groups, and will be asked to find the answers to a series of questions about the other students at their table. These questions will serve as a jumping-off point to lead into discussion of one another’s post-graduation and career plans.
Activity Day 6: Functions upon Functions
Students will actively engage in the exploration of graphical expressions of functions as they investigate real phenomena and conjecture how these phenomena vary over time. Specifically, students will vertically throw a ball and hypothesize about the graph of the ball’s distance (from ground) as a function of time and its relationship with the graph of the ball’s velocity as a function of time. Students will use motion detectors and graphing calculators to collect data on the height of the ball at various points of time, examining the resulting graphs. Logger Pro software will be used to display the image of a ball thrown vertically in slow motion, while the graphs of distance versus time and velocity versus time develop in synchronization.
Students will conjecture about the relationship of other phenomena as a function of time as they create and analyze graphs using data that they collected in previous activities. Among the data they will examine will be the height, velocity, and acceleration of their rockets over time (AD2); salinity and dissolved oxygen of stream water over a year (AD1); and functional relationships such as temperature vs. albedo (AD1); temperature vs. air pressure; and dissolved oxygen vs. temperature (AD1); air pressure vs. height (AD2).
Sampling Like Atlas: During a break, students will explore the benefits of random sampling through a simple activity involving an inflatable globe. Students will throw the inflatable globe to one another, and keep track of how many times the tip of their left ring finger falls on land or water. They will then attempt to measure the relative area of land to water using a more direct measurement of their own devising. Each set of estimates will then be compared to the known area of land and water surface on the Earth. This activity will illustrate how a random sample can produce more accurate estimates than direct measurements, and will also illustrate the importance of sample size.
Activity Day 7: Internship Finder Service
Students will apply for summer internships.
Students who finish early will be introduced to computer programming using Alice, a graphical programming language for learning about object-oriented languages. They will learn how to produce 3-D animations.
Activity Day 8: Field Trip to the Potomac River at Great Falls
For this activity, students will visit the Potomac River at Great Falls. During this trip, the students will use a water quality sonde to test dissolved oxygen, chlorophyll, pH, temperature, and turbidity at different locations and depths along the trip. These data will be plotted using onboard wireless laptop computers. The data that the students collect on this trip will be compared directly to the data they collected on the first activity day (The Local Environment).
Activity Day 9: College Finance Workshop & Parents' Night
The Geomatics Academy participants will meet with the students’ parents/guardians at FHHS during a weekday evening. Selected students will speak to the group describing their experiences with the project. A Towson University admission officer will speak with students and parents / guardians, outlining what students should do in their junior and senior years to select and prepare applications for college admission. This activity is described in greater detail above, under ‘The College Workshop.’ It will be open to all parents of students in the GEAR-UP cohort.