e/h/s story, part 1
As a student in Dr. Julie Dodd’s Writing for Mass Communication class, I have just started working on the infamous environmental/health/science story.
Having had much success in covering the school beat while interning and freelancing at The Miami Herald, I decided to call my old high school, MAST Academy, to dig for ideas. As an acclaimed maritime science and research magnet school, MAST is involved in dozens of projects every year. Out of one phone call I gleaned five story buds, two of which I considered for the e/h/s story and three that I plan to follow up on for freelance work.
Initially, I was interested in writing about two senior girls’ independent project with solar energy. The swim team at the high school practices in the pool year-round, racking up tens of thousands of dollars in water heating costs with the old propane heater just between October and March. The two girls have been working for the last year and a half to try to get high-tech modular solar panels installed on the roof of the school, located in sunny Miami, with mixed success. Lately, however, the project has come to a standstill, leading me to dig for another lead.
In the end I settled on a developing project based on the preexisting Global Forest Watch. GFW involves high school students all over the world in the process of science as they collect data from forests and compare their findings to data collected by NASA satellites. This project is important both for NASA scientists and researchers and for the students involved. The scientists are able to verify both sets of information against each other to determine the accuracy of the satellites and the students are incorporated into real research.
A former NASA scientist-turned-New Hampshire professor now wants to start a Global Ocean Watch using MAST as a developing ground for the project. According to my source at the school, science teacher Mark Tohulka, the National Science Foundation and NASA have already allocated a sizable amount of money for startup costs. The project could be directly integrated into curricula at the school, enabling students to interact with NASA scientists as well as other students from around the world while participating in important scientific research.
This is all the research I have so far, but when I return home in a few days I will be able to connect with Tohulka and get in touch with some of the key players in the project. I will also call my editor at the Herald — getting published gets us extra credit in the class and eighty bucks in my pocket never hurts.
2 years ago • Notes