Week 3 Post-trip report

Posted by Brian Fitzgerald February 15, 2018

Week 3 Post-trip report

What an amazing experience! While the weather required that we be a little flexible in regards to our departure time and allotted time on top of the summit, Sean and I could not be more thankful to have participated in such an incredible professional opportunity!

With the impending storm headed our way, our journey up to the summit of Mount Washington started at 6:30am. We were greeted by several staff, interns, and volunteers who were headed up the mountain a bit ahead of schedule to make sure the shift change could happen as planned. You have to appreciate the amount of planning, communication, and forecasting that goes into each shift change. The safety of all MWOBS employees, volunteers, and visitors is clearly a priority!

The Snowcat ride up was quite a treat. After loading up gear for the week and our student projects, we were on our way. While there was no stopping for photo ops due to time constraints, our ascent up the mountain was absolutely breathtaking. We were encouraged to open the windows to take pictures, experience the wind traveling through the Snowcat, and acclimate ourselves to the very steep cliffs beside us. In just over an hour’s time, we had reached the summit and were quickly taken up to the observation deck to be able to test our students’ projects.

My honors physical science class of freshmen worked collaboratively with Sean’s honors chemistry class of sophomores and juniors to design protective enclosures for our school’s Vernier data collection equipment. Consisting of LabQuest 2 data collection devices, stainless steel temperature probes, relative humidity meters, barometers, anemometers, a pyranometer, and external batteries, students had to design enclosures that would protect our less sophisticated data collection instruments from Mount Washington’s extreme conditions. Our students worked exceptionally hard to design their enclosures and we were excited to be able to test them out. We connected the “brains” to each probe just inside the door to the observation deck then set out into the cold, about 0°F with winds around 25 mph. We set the projects down near the A frame and were able to set out to explore the summit while the projects, hopefully, collected the data.

After getting a tour of the summit, a cup of coffee in the living quarters, and a tour of the weather center itself, Sean and I headed back outside to collect the probes. With the exception of the anemometer and relative humidity meter (both of which had extremely limited operating conditions), all student projects were a success and match the data collected by instrumentation at the summit. Even the pyranometer, which was the only one at the summit, showed a change in the amount of sunlight due to changing visibility and cloud cover. This was an incredible, hands-on, and authentic problem-solving learning experience for our students, something that the new NGSS standards encourage. Students were given the invaluable opportunity to interact with a meteorologist on the summit, reach out to local airports for advice, collaborate with students from a different class, design and build functional enclosures, compare their results with summit data and other students, calculate their percent error, and problem solve how they might improve their design to get more accurate and precise results if given another opportunity. When students are able to see that their learning is relevant to everyday life, careers, other subjects, and current events it increases proficiency, student learning, and understanding. Our students are still talking about their incredible opportunity, what they learned, and how much fun they had participating in this project. It is our hope that this authentic STEM opportunity, and others, inspire them to continue their science educations and aspirations! As one group wrote on their project…”to infinity and beyond.”