Greetings from Mansfield School in Port Murray, New Jersey, USA.

We recorded the sunrise, sunset, and temperature for one week, April 29 to May 3.
When we downloaded the data from around the world, we learned to “sort” the information in the spreadsheet to put the data in order by latitude. Examining the data in this way allowed us to see how the latitude affected the average sunlight hours at a school. We could easily see the pattern in the data showing that the farther North the school was, the longer their daylight hours, and the farther the south the school was, the shorter their daylight hours at this time of year. Though we had studied this topic in our science unit before, and most everyone remembered that the countries in the northern hemisphere of the Earth tilt toward the sun at this time of year, looking at the data made it all seem more real. When we graphed the data, the line was steadily increasing as the latitude increased.

It was very interesting for us to compare our daylight hours here at Mansfield School in New Jersey, USA, with that of a school in Queensland Australia, which is named Mansfield State School. They are south of the Equator, and we calculated that we had 2.8 more daylight hours than they did at this time of year. Using the Mansfield State School as a reference made looking at the results all that more meaningful for us.

It was also most interesting to see that, indeed, the schools closest to the Equator were experiencing the warmest temperatures. Because we use the Fahrenheit scale for temperature, we got some practice converting Celsius degrees to Fahrenheit. We learned different ways to make the computer calculate for us; using the computer’s desktop calculator as well as using formulas in the spreadsheet program.

Thank you for a most interesting project ! We especially liked reading the letters from the different schools and learning from each other.

E-mail: machalekr@warrennet.org