Student Work

Global Temperature Project

The Sun Times

Fall 1998 Student Final Reports

All classes participating in the Fall 1998 project were asked to submit a final report to the project Discussion Area. In this report, students shared what they learned from doing the project. Read on to see the results of the students' hard work!

Final Report from Collins Elementary School - Livingston, New Jersey, USA
Final Report from Wettel Elementary School - Vernon, New York, USA
Final Report from Rockwood Area High School - Rockwood, Pennsylvania, USA
Final Report from Pennfield Central Elementary School - Battle Creek, Michigan, USA
Final Report from Hustonville Elementary School
Final Report from St. John Vianney High School - Holmel, New Jersey, USA
Final Report from Brookwood School - Spruce Grove, Alberta, Canada
Final Report from Craig House - Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA

Final Report from Collins Elementary School - Livingston, New Jersey, USA

We had a great time participating in this project and found several interesting facts.

1. The coldest location was in Alaska. We wondered what it must be like to live there.

2. Generally, the closer you got to the equator, the warmer it was.

3. The locations in the southern hemisphere seemed to be warmer. We then discovered that they are beginning their summer, while we are beginning our winter in the northern hemisphere. We think this explains why it is warmer in the southern hemisphere.

4. Like one of the other schools, we also realized that we were unusually warm in New Jersey for the time of year that the project took place. Mr. Diegnan, our teacher, mentioned the same thing had happened the previous year. We wonder if other schools had the same thing.

5. The warmest location was in Australia.

Our third grade classes enjoyed this project and recommend Mr. Diegnan to do it again next year with his new classes. So long from the Third Grade at Collins Elementary School, Livingston, NJ. Follow the link provided to check out our school website.

Final Report from Wettel Elementary School - Vernon, New York, USA

Wettel Elementary School, Vernon, NY, USA Grade 4

We learned a lot from doing this project. We learned that in the winter the Southern hemisphere has more daylight due to the tilt of the Earth's axis. We also learned that where you're positioned on the Earth, closer to or farther away from the equator, determines how much heat and how many hours of sunlight you get.

Our temperature for the month of December was well above normal! In fact, we set records for high temperatures last month. We were concerned that these record highs might effect the outcome of our project.

We really enjoyed reading e-mail from so many different classes amd learning about different parts of the world. It was fun to think that we were all doing the same things at the very same time. We had fun using the Celsius conversion programs, too!

Final Report from Rockwood Area High School - Rockwood, Pennsylvania, USA

We grouped the data we received into six groups from which we created two graphs each: Temperature v latitude, Sunlight v Latitude. Then we analyzed the graphs, checking for trends, similarities, differences.

These are our findings/comments.

1. The closer to the equator, the warmer the temperature. But summer and winter are opposite for the northern and southern hemispheres.

2. We, Rockwood, had an unnaturally warm week. In fact, we set record high temperatures.

3. Re: sunlight. We noticed the farther from the equator, the less sunlight an area receives. Conversely, the closer to the equator, the more sunlight an area receives. Currently, the southern hemisphere has more sunlight than the northern hemisphere due to the tilting of the earth's axis. We realized that when the northern hemishpere has its winter solstice, the southern hemishpere has its summer solstice.

4. We wondered how areas with approximately the same latitude and hemisphere have approximately 370 more minutes of daylight than us. So we double checked our math.

5. We noticed some schools posted latitude in degrees and minutes. We had thought of doing that, but did not. Now we wish we had because it looks so much more professional.

6. We did not realize so much math was involved in social studies.

We really enjoyed participating in the Sun Temperature Project. It was fun reading emails from schools in countries we studies in World Geography last year. We have your emails posted so everyone can read about all the different schools. We also have all our a main copy of our graphs posted so all can compare areas around the world.

Bye from Rockwood

Final Report from Pennfield Central Elementary School - Battle Creek, Michigan, USA

From Pennfield Central Elementary, Battle Creek, Michigan, USA (85 W, 42 N)

This is some of the information we discovered in doing The Global Temperature Project:

1. Our own temperature was well above normal at this time of year. We wondered if other areas were similarly above normal.

2. Schools in the southern hemisphere (Australia) were hotter and had more day light. We came to the conclusion that this was because it was the summer months.

3. As you went farther north the temperatures became colder and the days became shorter. We questioned how this effected school children when they do not have much daylight.

4. We recorded similarities and differences and noticed that schools near us had many similarities and few differences and as we traveled farther away there were fewer similarities and more differences. We wanted to get more information about the regions to see if there are more similarities and differences other than temperature.

This was a good project and we enjoyed participating.

Pennfield Central Elementary Battle Creek, Michigan teverett@remc12.k12.mi.us

Final Report from Hustonville Elementary School

Dear Participants of the Global Temperature Project:

1. During this project we learned how to locate places on the map by using latitude and longitude.

2. We have a better understanding about how global temperatures affect our lives and economies.

3. We made our own scatterplots to graph latitude verses minutes of sunlight and latitude verses temperature, and we found that we are similar to the rest of the data.

4. We enjoyed receiving the emails from the other participants and finding out where they are located on our world map.

Thank you for sending us letters, and we hope to here from you again.

Hustonville Elementary School

Final Report from St. John Vianney High School - Holmdel, New Jersey, USA

During that time of year, areas below the equator are experiencing summer while areas in the northern hemissphere are experiencing winter. Dispite record breaking temperatures in the U.S due to the suns position in the perspective to the earth the time expsure to the sun in minutes declines at a steady pace and due to the lack of sun, the temperature is supposed to decreate. In contrast areas in the southern hemisphere, experiencing summer, daylight time increases along with overall temperature. Due to the sunlight inability to reach the areas to the extreme north and south, such as the Noth Pole and South Pole, temperatures in these areas of extremely low despite their seasons and their exposure to daylight is also resticted. The more minutes of sunshine, the greater the temperature. The rays are hitting the earth at an angle as you go north or south of the equator and there are less minutes of sun and cooler temperatures.

Final Report from Brookwood School - Spruce Grove, Alberta, Canada

We decided to choose a project participant that we felt would have a climate much different than ours. We chose McFarlane
Primary School in Australia and proposed 6 questions:

1. What did we predict its average temp. would be. We chose 28C but it was 39C.

2. What did we predict its average sunlight would be. We chose 600 min. but it was 780 min.

3. What did we feel its current season is like based on what we learned from the project data. We felt they were having late spring or early summer because they are south of the equator and we, being north of the equator, are having our winter.

4. What would they dress like to go to school. We felt that they would probably be wearing shorts and t-shirts and they probably don't even have special winter clothes because they are so close to the equator.

5. What would their Christmas be like. We think they eat roast turkey, Christmas pudding and mince pie. They probably have Christmas on a sandy beach because they have no snow and hot weather.

6. How does the climate of an area affect the types of jobs people have. They can build roads in the middle of winter and we can't due to our frost and snow. They can do more work during the day in this season because they have much more daylight time. They probably have more diverse wildlife than we do because their climate is so mild. Our animals have to be able to survive severe cold temperatures.

We really enjoyed the project and learned a lot more about our great planet and its many different areas.

Final Report from Craig House - Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA

From our participation in the Global Sun Project, we reached several conclusions about sunlight, temperature and location. First, we found that the temperature is directly related to the minutes of sunlight: the higher the temperature, the more minutes of sunlight. This made sense to us because a location which received more sunlight should have higher temperatures. Next we found that the general rule was that the closer a place was to the equator, the more minutes of sunlight it had. (San Mateo, CA was the exception, and since their 930 minutes of sunlight means they had 15 hours of sun, we wondered if they made a mistake and actually meant they had 9 and a half hours of sunlight.) Based on the earth's shape, we decided this finding also made sense. Regardless of the tilt of the earth, the equator is always closest to the sun. Our final conclusion was that locations at similar latitudes and longitudes have similar temperatures and periods of sunlight. We looked at the sites that were clustered together and found they were very close in both temperature (less than 5 degree differences) and periods of sunlight (under 60 minutes). We witnessed first hand that latitude and longitude definitely influence both temperature and time of sunlight. We did have one thought which is related to the seasons. We wondered if we repeated the exact experiment with the same participants in the Northern Hemisphere's late spring how that would effect the results.

Thanks for the opportunity to explore and share our views with others!

Group 1 @ Craig House

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