A University Offers On-Line Science Lesson for Middle-School Students Worldwide
By VINCENT KIERNAN
What determines the temperature at which water boils? With help from a New Jersey university, middle-school students around the world are using the Internet to find out for themselves, instead of simply reading the answer in a textbook.
Classes participating in an experiment called the International Boiling Point Project, which began September 13, are doing the measurements in their schools. Using a form on the World-Wide Web, each class will report the boiling-point temperature as well as the temperature in the room, the elevation of the school above sea level, the amount of water boiled, and the method by which the water was heated.
As of November, students will be able to download a compilation of the measurements from a Web site operated by the Stevens Institute of Technology (http://www.ciese.org/curriculum/boilproj/index.html), with which they can look for relationships between the boiling point and the other measurements.
If all goes according to plan -- not to mention the laws of physics -- the graphs that students draw from the measurements will show a clear relationship between a school's elevation and the temperature at which water boils there. At sea level, water boils at 212 degrees Fahrenheit, but as elevation increases, the boiling point declines. For example, at 1,000 feet, water boils at 210.2 degrees; at 5,000 feet, 203 degrees.
The students also should find that there is no relationship between the boiling point and other factors that varied among particpating classes, such as the volume of water that was boiled.
"What we're trying to do is to let the students discover that firsthand, for themselves," says Mercedes McKay, senior Internet curriculum specialist at the Center for Improved Engineering and Science Education at Stevens.
The Hoboken, N.J., center, which focuses on improving science education in primary and secondary schools, offers several such Internet-based science projects for use by science teachers and their classes. Some, like the boiling-point project, use the Internet to allow distant classes to collaborate with one another.
The center also offers math and science exercises that rely on measurements relayed live from scientific instruments via the Internet. For example, in another on-line project offered by Stevens, students use images and measurements from weather satellites to deduce the location of a fictitious scientist who has been kidnapped.
In addition to the data base of temperature measurements, the Web site devoted to boiling points allows classes to post information about themselves, their hypotheses about what will happen in the experiment, and the conclusions they reach after analyzing the data collected by all participants. The site also provides a forum for discussion among the participants in the project. "It's a way for them to participate in a science experiment, to collect real data," says Ms. McKay.
"It shows the kids that what you're learning in class is the real world," says Eileen Bendixsen, who teaches seventh- and eighth-grade science at Beers Street Middle School, in Hazlet, N.J., and whose classes will participate in the boiling-point project. Hazlet is located near sea level, so students in Ms. Bendixsen's classes can't directly measure altitude's effect on water's boiling point, she says. The Internet-based experiment gives her teaching more credibility in the eyes of her students, she adds.
The center's offerings are becoming more popular as elementary and secondary schools in the United States and abroad become better wired to the Internet, says Ms. McKay. More than 50 schools have registered to participate in the boiling-point project, which could accommodate even more. Besides the United States, the nations represented include Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Peru, and Turkey, she says.
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Section: Information Technology
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