Journal 7

Article:
Retracing Shackleton’s Journey to Antarctica to Connect Math and Literature
By Erin Colfax

I am always interested in articles that explore methods of teaching math that connect it to other subjects or “real life” and make math concepts interesting for students. I got all that and more from this article. It describes one imaginative teacher’s use of a scientific experiment using iScienceProject support from Onset Computer Corp. iScienceProject supports science education projects that use it’s HOBO instruments to gather data. The HOBO probes log data including temperature, barometric pressure, humidity, and light. There’s more information on the iScienceProject at http://www.iscienceproject.com .

Question 1: How did the students use the HOBO instruments for a science project?
The students designed an experiment that would involve the probes being used in various places near Antarctica to measure temperature. Before the probes were sent to the researchers on the spot they were calibrated and the experiment’s parameters were specified by the students. They made some predictions of the results in terms of the linear equation y=mx+b.

Question 2: How was this experiment connected to other subjects and “real life”?
The students had read a literary work, “Endurance”, by F.A.Worsley which tells the story of sir Ernest Schackleton’s expedition to Antarctica. After that they were able to design an experiment which connected the historical event to actual environmental conditions at locations along the route taken by the explorers. By graphing the data and trying to fit it to a linear equation they connected math to science to history to literature.

Question 3: What kind of teaching method is that?
I believe this is an example of progressive education or experimentalism teaching philosophy. This method is used to go very deep on a few projects instead of having the children memorize and drill. This is also a good example of using technology to teach higher order concepts as was mentioned in the Social Justice article in Journal 6.