A full semester project engaging University students with a medium size country school of 175, team ILAMAPALL engaged students of a variety of ages with high altitude balloons to engender excitement with the science and technology and educate them on the atmosphere, environment, physics, and many other skills. That's definitely enough to win them the 2nd place prize for Most Educational Initiative! Keep up the incredible work team!
Link to full report: here
From the team: "Our project called ’Atmosphere and Me’ was carried out in Estonia, which is rather small country with a population of 1.3 million located in North-East Europe. The project was a collaboration between Kanepi Gymnasium (school) and the University of Tartu´s Laboratory of Atmospheric Physics and Centre for School Physics
Kanepi Gymnasium is a medium size, countryside school of 175 students ages 7 – 18. In contrast the University of Tartu is the biggest and oldest university in Estonia, established 1632.
The project lasted for an entire semester with activities aimed at developing the sudents understanding of the atmosphere, environment and some physics related to the aforementioned subjects. The activities and technical preparations were led and conducted by physics and geography students and lecturers from the University of Tartu.
The balloon called ’Ilmapall’ was launched on 27th April 2016 from Kanepi Gymnasium school stadium. The balloon´s payload included a range of sensors which monitored temperature, humidity, pressure and UV-radiation. There was also GPS and a GO-PRO camera.
So far primary data including flight duration, altitude, vertical and horizontal speed and temperature etc. have been presented to the students in a seminar although the highlight was the video footage that was captured by the on board camera. We were able to collect quite unique shots of the biggest lake in Estonia called Peipsi. This is on the border between Estonia and Russia and has an area of 3555 km2.
Although the project has its focus at the development of the students understanding of science related knowledge and understanding the outcomes have been far greater. Most significant has been the pride that has grown within the students with the growing recognition of what they have been able to achieve.
