On April 22nd, schools all over the U.S. will participate in Earth Day events aimed at increasing students’ awareness of environmental issues. Several schools will be using Vernier products to collect data in their local communities. Here’s what one school has planned.

Dundalk Middle School–Baltimore, MD
The city of Baltimore sits on the banks of Maryland’s picturesque Chesapeake Bay. Surrounded on three sides by water, residents sometimes take the quality of that water for granted. But on Earth Day, Dundalk Middle School students will be carefully analyzing this precious resource, and reminding local residents that protecting the environment is a responsibility that should be shared by all.

The school’s 200 eighth-graders are slated to visit Merritt Park, located on the Chesapeake Bay Watershed. There, they will visit a total of nine stations set up by their science teachers, and will perform a variety of experiments on water samples collected from the area. Using Vernier LabPros and CBL 2s, the students will test temperature, salinity, acidity, dissolved oxygen, turbidity, and more. Then, using Logger Pro software, laptop computers, and graphing calculators, students will be able to create colorful graphs and charts that will help them analyze the concentration levels of the various elements, and determine the overall quality of the water.

Science teacher Trish Knight envisions the activity as the kick-off for a series of similar events to be held in Baltimore monthly. “We don’t plan to stop our water-quality monitoring after Earth Day is over,” Knight explains. “We hope to have a group of kids who’ll do more testing one weekend each month at different sites around the area, which will get the greater community involved. The students can continue collecting the data with the Vernier products. My hope is that parents, relatives, and friends will then venture over to see what we’re doing with the technology.”

Knight says the Vernier instruments are ideal for today’s visual learners. “The kids love these tools!” she says. “This generation of students is much more attuned to creating and using real-time data, instead of looking at some graph in a textbook. Being able to do the experiments from start to finish, and to see the results in real time, is so much more meaningful to them. And, the tools are so easy to use. Whenever the kids see the Vernier product box out on the table, they get very excited.”

In a community in which many of the students’ homes face the rivers and creeks of the Chesapeake Bay, there can be a tendency to forget the significance of that vast body of water. But Knight is confident that the Earth Day expedition will remind students and their families that treating the bay with respect today is the key to a clean, healthy future.

“Luckily, our principal, Tom Shouldice, was also a science teacher, and he’s very involved in this initiative,” says Knight. “And being a Title I school, we’re extremely fortunate to have a full compliment of tools, including the Vernier sensors and software. We believe these types of activities—and the support we’ve received from Vernier—will help us maintain our focus on doing whatever we can to ‘save the bay.’”