ISETCSC summer high school student camp and earth science teacher workshop

Each year the NOAA Interdisciplinary Scientific Environmental Technology Cooperative Science Center (ISETCSC) offers a one-week-long Weather and Climate Camp for high school students interested in science and a one-week-long Earth Science Workshop for high school earth science teachers on the North Carolina A&T State University campus. Students and teachers are recruited locally. During 2009, twenty students and fifty teachers participated. For the student camp, the main thread that is developed throughout the week is that improvements in weather and climate forecasting are the result of improvements in data collection, data analysis, and modeling. To build an appreciation for this process, during the first part of the week student groups design and assemble one-wire weather stations. The students make modifications to java code provided to control each sensor. Later in the week, the data that the student groups collect with their weather stations is analyzed and used to make weather predictions. The students also are engaged in a variety of hands-on experiments, high quality videos, and presentations/ discussions by ISETCSC faculty and students from each of the ISETCSC research thrusts as well as an energy/environmental economist. Helping with the camp this year was a Kenan Fellow high school chemistry teacher who is developing curriculum for her classes based on a NOAA ISETCSC atmospheric chemistry project. The camp was an opportunity for the teacher to lend her experience teaching science to high school age students, learn more atmospheric science content, and test her new curriculum module. Another Kenan Fellow spent part of the summer in Africa developing curriculum for his classes based on the Africa Array project. The content for the teacher workshop was provided by NOAA scientists from the National Climate Data Center (NCDC) and the National Environmental Satellite Data and Information Service (NESDIS) as well as a team from the Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology (IRIS), Penn State, and AfricaArray. This work was supported by NOAA-EPP award # NA06OAR4810187, NSF Award # 0918165, and NSF supplement to OISE-0530062/3027-NCATS-NSF-0062.