Summary
Students engage in solving a real world challenge of designing, launching & tracking a weather balloon with the goal of recording the balloon’s journey with a digital video camera. No blueprint is provided so students are forced to research the design considerations that are necessary to ensure a safe launch that will allow the balloon to travel ~20 miles up into the atmosphere and back while ensuring that the GPS tracker and camera are able to function in the extreme temperatures, winds, speeds, and pressures that they will travel through. The project begins with the class naming a leader who then leads the class through brainstorming the tasks that will need to be addressed, the class then forms committees based on the jobs they have identified and set to work. Students come to understand the layers of the atmosphere and the temperature and pressure characteristics of each as a result of the project but more importantly they are forced to identify and solve real world problems with a “cookbook” set of directions to follow. Success was measured not by recovering the balloon (which we were fortunate to do) but by successfully launching and tracking the balloon throughout it’s flight (which we also accomplished).
TIPC Ratings
Students posed and answered their own questions using their resources they identified as appropriate. Research tools included web sites, blogs (of other individuals, professional & amateur who have launched similar balloons), interviews with weather service & FAA personal, Google Earth, SPOT GPS Website Tracking
Students selected a leader, identified necessary committees, joined the committee they were most interested in and then worked as a committee to identify and solve problems. Groups used GoogleDocs to plan and communicate as a class and with students in other classes. At the conclusion of the process students were asked to reflect on what they learned about themselves and about being a member of a group from the project.
Students worked in their committees to identify potential challenges that their committee would be responsible for addressing and then researched potential solutions for their challenge. They then had to explain their solution and options they did not select to the team leader, teacher and “devil’s advocate”. With this challenge there was not one “right answer” but successfully identifying, planning for, and overcoming all potential issues was the only way that a balloon could be successfully launched, tracked and recovered. Examples of problems students identified and solved include deciding between different methods for tracking the balloon, determining how to keep the camera and GPS devise warm enough to function, determining how much Helium would be required to lift our payload package.
This challenge was devised in response to student questions about a similar project we’d seen a video about. After explaining the challenge to the students, they were encouraged to consult all available resources to design the best possible launch & recovery plan. There were no “right answers” and no template to follow. Class leaders worked with committees to consider many possible strategies to solve the problems each team faced, in the end, the class had to decide which strategies to pursue. The project embodies risk taking as in the end we packed several hundred dollars’ worth of equipment into a cooler and attached it to a balloon hoping that our planning would result in the successful recover of the equipment. At the conclusion of the process, students were asked to share suggestions for how I could improve the process for future years.
Download Files
Weather-Balloon-Project-Lesson-Plan-53181.zip
Contents:
- Lesson Plan
- Additional Lesson Files
- Link to Production Video
- Link to Student Artifact
