Learning Goes GLOBE-al

Update - August 2018 - The GLOBE Program recently published an article about Rutgers Prep's involvement in this landmark initiative. Read more by clicking here.

Next year, RPS students will have a chance to literally save our planet. Rutgers Prep has just joined the Global Learning and Observations to Benefit the Environment (GLOBE) program, a worldwide community of teachers, students, and citizens dedicated to understanding and sustaining Earth’s environment. The program is active in over one hundred countries and is managed in the United States by NASA, with participation by students in all 50 states.

The program offers fun, meaningful tasks to students at every grade level. Kindergarteners can record daily temperatures and pass their results on to older students to analyze and graph. Upper School students will process that data, along with climatological observations of their own, and enter it into a worldwide database. Everyone’s work will be an important part of the larger whole, and every student involved can take pride in being a “citizen scientist.” Dr. Valerie Pierce, an Upper School science teacher who helped bring GLOBE onto campus, is excited about its value: “GLOBE’s databases encompass the entire planet. It’s scientific Big Data, and Big Data is used in business, in medicine, in advertising… Giving students that skill set is really preparing them for the 21st century.”

GLOBE also involves extensive work with technology, from kites and drones used to obtain atmospheric data to state-of-the-art devices like “merge cubes,” which use virtual reality to project various forms of student-gathered data onto maps.

The program is so enticing that two RPS students decided not to wait until next fall to get started. After attending some of GLOBE’s workshops, Andrea Wang ’18 and Andy Zhang ’19 put together a project that examines how human activities raise temperatures in certain locations. The two flew a drone to collect temperature measurements in a South Jersey park and used an online geographic information system to map the results. Their efforts won them top honors at a recent GLOBE-sponsored symposium. “The most interesting about this program,” says Wang, “is the possibility to make an actual impact on the world [by] informing future generations about environmental protection.” In the months ahead, all students at RPS will be able to make just such an impact.