Concern for the environment has always been a hallmark of Janet Villas’ teaching in 8th grade science. But what can students do about issues like air pollution other than suffer the effects of it in downtown Brooklyn? Is there data on air pollution that can suggest a basis for action?
This Spring Semester, MS/US Science teacher, Janet Villas, wanted to help her students in 8C understand air pollution by bringing the issue home through showing how it affected Brooklyn Friends School in its setting in downtown Brooklyn at 375 Pearl St. So Janet devised a lab for her students in 8C where she had them compare the amount of particulates in the air around the school using glass slides. Students hypothesized where they expected to find the dirtiest slides. They then spread a thin layer of petroleum jelly on two plastic slides, placed the slides around Pearl Street where they wouldn’t be found, and then collected one slide after three days and the other after one week. Using a magnifying glass, they observed the number of dust particles on each slide and compared their results with the class results.
The results were starling. But the best way to illustrate the results would have been to map them geographically. So Janet asked her students in 8C to find a way to do this that would place the data in geographical positions around the school. Over a weekend, one of Janet's students devised a method to tie their findings to geographical positions. By using the Satellite view feature of Google Maps, the student and his classmates placed the data points as different color push pins at points where they had left the slides around the school. These are represented in the picture above, a satellite image taken by Google Earth of BFS.
North is to the top and the dark street running up and down the left side of the picture is Pearl St. The green pushpins represented the cleanest slides, the yellow, orange, and red pins the dirtiest in successive order with red being the dirtiest. As might be expected, the slides (red push pins) placed at the intersection of Pearl and Jay St. were the dirtiest because of their proximity to heavy traffic. On the other hand, slides placed near trees such as at the north end of the Pearl Street and away from street traffic such as the playground on the roof of the school were the cleanest. This suggested that planting trees and keeping children’s play areas away from traffic were ways to mitigate the effects of air pollution and this was clearly illustrated by using 21st Century learning tools.
