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IQALUIT
"Heat rises and cold goes down," says budding meteorologist Maxwell Joy of Iqaluit. "Because heat is lighter, it goes up. The cold is heavier, so it goes down."

Grade 3 Nakasuk student Luka Hess records temperature as part of a collaboration with Canadian Network for the Detection of Atmospheric Change scientists from the University of Toronto on Feb. 23. - photo courtesy of Tracey MacMillan

Joy is one of the student-researchers collaborating with a group of Canadian Network for the Detection of Atmospheric Change (CANDAC) scientists from the University of Toronto to collect and examine Arctic weather data. One of the older members of the Iqaluit contingent, Joy is a Grade 3 student at Nakasuk School.

"It was really fun to meet them and show them our instruments," he said of his experiences working with the CANDAC scientists, who visited in late February and set up the kindergarten to Grade 3 student-researchers with thermometers, wind socks and anemometers to collect their data.

"What I like the most is the anemometer because it measures the wind," Joy said. "It's really cool. It has a fan on top of it, and somehow it measures it."

The young researchers are a perfect match for the university crowd.

"It fits into a lot of the curriculum in elementary schools. For example, in Grade 2, students are required to know how to make measurements with thermometers," said CANDAC education outreach facilitator Ashley Kilgour. "We want the kids to have first-hand experience making measurements and recording data. A lot of it is about recording data and making observations, and then being able to compare their data to another data set."

The data collection is being done by four classes at Nakasuk, including Keith Oqallak's Grade 1 and Nadine O'Dell's Grade 2 classes, which are working on temperature, and Alison Hambleton and Ida Gardiner's Grade 3 classes, which are working on wind. Their results will be compared with similar data collection being done at a school in Newmarket, Ont.

"The value of that is to understand the differences you see in other places based on geography," Kilgour said.

The students are catching on and embracing the challenge.

"They are absolutely adoring it," Hambleton said. "First, it's nice to meet scientists because it's such an abstract concept. They read about them in books or see them on the news. To have them come into the classroom, it really makes it authentic and real. It also gives science a face that hopefully they'll be able to relate to."

It worked for Grade 3 student Melissa Pishuktie.

"I liked doing different activities with them," Pishuktie said. "We could go outside and use one of the instruments so we could see what the temperature is."

One of the experiments the CANDAC scientists showed Jessica Nelson piqued the Grade 3 student's interest. By mixing dyed hot and cold water, she was able to see how heat rises.

"There was water and they put blue dye in one and yellow in another," Nelson said. "They took the cold one and put it on top of the warm, and the water changed colour (to green). Then they did the opposite, and the water didn't change."

These experiments help the student-researchers understand why it's colder in the North, why it's warmer in the south, and different factors that influence the weather, Kilgour said.

The student-researchers will continue their experiments and present their findings to CANDAC's outreach team upon their return to Iqaluit in May. As part of last year's similar collaboration, some of the students at Qarmartalik School in Resolute Bay made videos and others made graphs summarizing their data.

"I hope they'll crunch some numbers and be able to make some predictions about what's happening with our weather," Hambleton said of the project. "It's to really engage students in understanding science, to make observations, understand the scientific method, and understand the world in which they live through their observations of weather."

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