[Student 1 speaking]
We had to research about the hurricanes that affected us this year; sort of make

something that’s try to prevent the hurricanes.

[Teacher voiceover]

As you can see in the classroom they are working in groups of four. And there’s four different jobs. So they’re working as either a scientist, a technologist, the sociologist, and the last one was the mathematician. So the mathematician, they’re responsible for creating graphs of the different hurricanes, determining the factors that cause the wind speeds to change, and graphing the paths of at least three different hurricanes. So they work with the scientist in the group coming up with some of the causes there and they’re responsible for graphing the data.

The scientist they also has specific jobs, figuring out what caused the hurricane to form. The sociologist they have to figure out how this impact society, how it affects the city or the people in the entire state.

[Student 2 speaking]

I used Microsoft Excel and what I did; it’s about the monetary damages of three different hurricanes that have happened.

[Student 3 speaking]

This is our introduction, and a hurricane is a storm that reaches speeds of 75 miles per hour. We have studied hurricanes, and we want to invent a machine that stops a hurricane in its path.

[Student 4 speaking]

So this is our thing, the wind direction changer.

[Student 1 speaking]

It changes the wind direction pretty much. So like if a hurricane is going one way it would change the direction so it would prevent it.

[Teacher voiceover]

After they’ve collected their research, then they have to brainstorm as a group. And the brainstorming involves using the Inspiration program the school has.

My favorite part of this project is it was right between hurricane Katrina and hurricane Wilma and the great part was while they’re out of school for two weeks after hurricane Wilma’s effects, all of them knew all about how a hurricane forms, they knew all about the news, it all made sense to them, and it became very relevant to them. They realized that the things they learned about in class weren’t just things that were in a textbook, online, some where else. These are real live things that impact their lives in a real way every year.

So using that even a couple of weeks later they were able to see in the newspaper, the front page had ideas that said, ‘Here are five different ideas that scientists have to stop a hurricane, to weaken a hurricane, or redirect it’. And the students they came in all excited. Some of them even came in with papers, “Hey look these are our ideas these are the things we came up with”. This isn’t just some project, and I said, “Yeah, of course.”

And then that was a lesson also about how science works, that even though scientists come up with the same ideas, sometimes there’s certain logical conclusions that even scientists working apart they’re going to come up with the same conclusions. And that was an important lesson too.

And they were very proud that the ideas that they came up with were the same ones that big named scientists have come up with and people who actually are professionals in meteorology came up with the same solutions.

And they’ve gone ahead, they’ve written down, what are the different stages of the hurricane, they even have what some of their solutions are, what caused the hurricane to form. And then they came up with three different ideas how they’re going to stop this hurricane, weaken it, or redirect it somewhere else.

Some students’ projects are actually going to be, lend themselves to making a model. For example, one group back there they created a little model of the city and there was going to be this dome that would pop up from underground. And the other groups they had some ideas like bringing in icebergs to try to cool the ocean water just a few degrees, just enough to allow the hurricane to not build up as strong, or maybe to even cause the hurricane just to remain at a tropical storm.