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Tuesday, February 14, 2006 10:47 PM CST
CMS students take science project to Springfield
By DAVE FOPAY, Staff Writer
CHARLESTON -- Their trip will only cover about 100 miles, but their real journey has taken them millions more.
Four Charleston Middle School students will travel to Springfield Thursday to show off the school’s pictures of Mars, taken just for them as part of a national project. They’ll be part of the “TECH 2006 Students for the Information Age” at the state Capitol where lawmakers and others can see student science projects from around the state.
Eighth-graders Travis Diss, Daysha Evans, Aaron Laursen and Taylor Sauerwein all said they were excited about making the trip, just as they’ve been excited since the Mars project began.
“It’s really different,” Taylor said. “It’s better than anything else we’ve had in science class.”
Teacher Tim McCollum said having his classes participate in the Mars Student Imaging Project was something he’s planned for some time. The project is a joint effort by the Mars Education Center at Arizona State University and NASA.
McCollum said he thinks the best thing about the project is students are allowed to select a location on Mars to be photographed and then come up with questions related to the areas they choose.
“It allows the students to act as mission scientists,” he explained. “The neatest part is just getting our own pictures of Mars. They will literally be contributing to the knowledge of another world.”
The Mars Odyssey spacecraft took the pictures on Nov. 22 and the four eighth-grade science classes at CMS first saw them early last month. McCollum picked the four students who will make the Springfield trip to come up with question proposals, and the project chose all four to be answered.
The four images show two craters, a canyon and a lava flow. The students’ asked if all Martian channels lead away from craters, how volcanoes and lava flows are different there than on Earth, if all craters on Mars are perfectly round and why storms form where they do on the planet.
“It isn’t that much different,” Travis said of his question on the volcanoes and lava. “I thought the atmosphere would create different lava flows.”
Aaron said he came up with the question on storms because the students saw they could be in found in various locations.
“We were just looking through a lot of images and saw that storms tended to form in different places,” he said.
Daysha noted not all the answers are in yet, but she’s excited about the “whole thing” when it comes to the project.
“It feels pretty good to be the first,” she said, referring to the fact that images were taken exclusively for the CMS project.
McCollum said the project teaches the students to think at a higher level and it was good that it “kind of flipped things around” and made them come up with questions instead of having to answer them.
The four eighth-graders are not only good students, but were “particularly engaged” by the project, McCollum added, so that’s why he chose them to write the question proposals and to have “the privilege of going to Springfield.”
McCollum said the Olympia school district in McLean County is the only other one in Illinois that’s participating in the Mars project.
Contact Dave Fopay at dfopay@jg-tc.com or 348-5733.
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