Final Report: December, 2002

Dear Participants,

It has been an exciting project. We had a great time collecting the data for the project. The temperature data was collected using the weather station located at Miami metro Zoo. The weather station data also appears on the local news from time to time. The students gathered daylight minutes from the Internet. Our classrooms have eight computers with Internet access and we take full advantage of the resources given to us. We were also able to us the Internet in the classroom to download the data from the other participants in the project. The next step involved using the data to construct graphs on Microsoft Excel. It was an excellent opportunity to practice graphing skills on Excel. The graph did help to visualize the relationship between the latitudes of the earth and the amount of sunlight that occurs. The data also supported the theory that the temperature is higher at latitudes closer to the equator. We think that it would be better to continue this study for a longer period of time. The reason that this point was made was because Miami experienced colder than average temperatures for the data collection week. This began a discussion about the differences between weather and climate. We are expecting a visit from the Alliance Group to our classroom. We are creating PowerPoint presentations about the project for the visitors. We would like to thank the individuals responsible for creating the Global Sun Project. Please feel free to respond to our class through the discussion section. We would like to have pen pals. Thank you very much!

Mr. Lopez and his 8th Grade Earth Space Science Class

E-mail: rockspitcher@yahoo.com