Year 8 at Arrowtown School en-route to becoming air quality experts!

As a part of Unlocking Curious Minds project, NIWA scientists spent their day at Arrowtown School with Year 8 students performing air quality experiments and learning about connections between air quality, weather and health in Arrowtown, New Zealand and around the world. Students observed particles in the air, measured air quality and weather and found out about their own lung capacity.

Highlight of the day for students

One of the things they learned was about how the cilia in our lungs help us breathe easily by keeping the particles out (to be honest though, they practiced the art of throwing paper balls at their teachers, while teachers failed miserably to defend themselves!!) - as is obvious from their facial expressions, they loved it..

Highlight of the day for scientists and teachers:

All the little activities during the day and 5-minute discussions around them triggered a huge variety of questions in their creative minds, some of them below:

• Does the amount of smoke in the air affect the temperature?
• Why does Arrowtown have one of the biggest problems with its air quality?
• How much smoke does an average bushfire produce?
• Could smoke particles be cleaned up by a vacuum cleaner?
• How much does the wind affect the air pollution of Arrowtown?
• Why does the smoke get trapped as a layer over Arrowtown?
• Do coastal towns have more or less air pollution compared to Arrowtown?

Over the next few months, along with the NIWA team students are going to research their own questions based on real data. 

Here is more from the day..

Blow up the balloon with one breath and measure the volume

Our winner had a lung capacity of 4 litres! Well done Ted 😊 When they blew it many times, they understood how their lung capacity decreased. They got curious to finding out how their lung capacity would change after running around the school or yoga!

Assemble “SkoMoBo- Konnect” instruments and measure air quality and weather around your school 

They found how humidity at different places around school was different during the day (we had rain in the morning and beautiful clear skies in the afternoon, so they recorded different numbers!). They also found that when we use different instruments we get different answers – followed by “this is why we need calibrations and corrections!”.

Spot particles in the room in a beam of light 

Are there more from the carpet, dry skin, clothes or is it the same everywhere! They sure got very creative in “finding” particles in the room – might have ended up cleaning some shelves too!! They learned how particles vary in size and composition, what they breathe in, what gets trapped in their lungs, what causes particles in the air in the first place and how they move around with wind by putting a fan in the room.

Stay tuned to find out more about the project!