This at present is no more than a sketch outline for a student transport project or a cycle of projects. However there are enough elements in hand such that an enterprising teacher and class will be able to make a magnificent job of it. It is our hope, of course, that once they have completed their project they will share in turn their results and recommendations with the others that come into and use this cooperative site.

Outline and Introduction

Here is rapid bullet form are some of the main building blocks for these projects:

• The students and teacher will get together and for several weeks or possibly an entire semester carry out a cooperative multidisciplinary study of the transport environment of the class and its members.
• It will be, to put big words to it, a combined science, social science, arts module.
• The focus of the project will be the study and analysis of the transport environment in and around the school, including the trip to and from school, by above all the children themselves but also the teachers, school staff and others who come there on a regular basis.
• The children will be the investigators and the teacher their coach/co-investigator (including extending the study to her own daily transport habits and choices).
• One possible study device will be the development of a certain number of more detailed transport profiles (maybe as anonymous composites?) of the facts, advantages and eventual drawbacks of different ways of getting to school (walking, biking, skating, school bus, public transport, parent driven cars, etc.) -- and then trying to draw some broader conclusions about more or less desirable ways of making these trips
• Here are some of the study devices that can usefully be put to work by the kids:
  • Transport logs (tracking their own daily transport means, including different ways to estimate top speed, overall door to door travel times, etc.)
  • Attempts to see if they can get teachers, school staff and their parents to compile their own logs for overall "systemic" analysis
  • Different ways of compiling and drawing conclusions from the individual travel logs
  • Field trips to observe transport behavior in and around the school, including interviews, short questionnaire programs to be administered to adults and others they encounter, photos and drawings of typical and less typical transport and vehicle behavior.
  • Systematic observations by small teams of what goes on at the 'school house door' as children and others arrive at and later leave the school.
  • Record the sounds of arrival and departure by different modes (walk, bike, etc.) in mini sound bites, and then use in various ways to provide further deapth to the perceptions and the analysis.
  • Interviews with parents to get their views, thoughts on the subject, as well as to ask if they have or might be willing to consider other transport arrangements.
  • Interviews with teachers, staff, and administrators with the same objectives
  • Daily measurements over some period with simple low cost, kid-built equipment capable of monitoring key air quality and other indicators in and around the school (including, why not, in the classrooms and recreation spaces... see below.)
• One of the most important challenges will be in the preparation of the final "report" on the project, which ideally will consist of a cluster of individual and small team projects and findings, which the kids will somehow eventually find ways to wrap into some sort of coherent and useful integral whole. Indeed, this task of group organization, synthesis, conclusion and communication will be among one fo the main challenges of the whole undertaking.
• Partner Search:
  The class may find it instructive to look around in the community to see if they can find partners for their project. One idea that comes to mind would be a collaborating organization for the final exposition and presentation. A local museum, university science department, newspaper, radio or television station, or city hall might be among the candidates. The kids might also look around for groups, public, private or volunteer, who might wish to come in and help out in some way. The very act of targeting and then contacting these extra-scholastic units and seeing what if any is there reaction and willingness to help can serve as a fine exercise in civics education all by itself.

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Global Lab Program

It's a terrific thing for children not only to get actively involved in understanding the details of their environment and they ways in which they and others by their choices in their daily lives can effect it -- but also to give them a chance to build simple instruments to measure and monitor environmental conditions in and around the school.

There is no reason to start from scratch in this, since a lot of good work has been done in many places on this precise subject. One useful source which is right at hand (so to speak) is the Air Unit Resources of TERC's Global Lab program which you can find at http://globallab.terc.edu/workspace/resources/airUnit.html. Global Lab is a science program that attempts to give students a real experience in doing science the way scientists do science. This project makes them members of a world-wide community of students and professional researchers who share data review the work of their peers.

The TERC team (and others) have developed quite a battery of kits that help children to build their own instruments, along with guidelines on how to take measurements, interpret them, and put them to practical uses. And while their tools until now have mainly been used in the context of their more ambition Global Labs Curriculum (to which we certainly draw your attention), they have been very generous with us in the past in sharing their information and materials with us. We can make the point however, that the actual cost of the raw materials is very very low.

The TERC program is of course not the only one that is active in trying to develop and support new ideas for more activist hands-on aproaches to scientific education. For a listing of other groups you may want to check out, please see the references (Check it Out) page here.

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Putting the Findings to Work

• Individual, small team and overall class reports and recommendations on their findings and conclusions.
• Public representation of their results -- including demonstrations in an open 'school fair' or similar setting of their monitoring tools, methodology, research results and recommendations.
• These last can also be the subject of a 'media campaign' by the class, with the target of getting their important messages out to the public
• The ideal public presentation by the kids would at the very least involve inviting parents and others in the school, and creating for the occasion a festive atmosphere.
• It would be very good to have not only exhibitions of drawings, photographs, charts, posters, and other creative expressions that help to make the children's main points, but also to include the possibility fo the reading of short stories, poems or short plays which help to point up problems and eventual solutions.
• In one of the children's programs in Spain, representatives of local government and the higher reaches of school administration in that city were invited, and given a chance to be publicly interviewed and questioned by the class. On that occasion, the event was covered by a local television station and eventually made its way into news programs and commentaries.

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Results Sharing

Another, more ambitious possibility might be for school teams to get together via the Web and perhaps this site to carry out joint projects involving two or more schools in different cities or countries. If this could be done (and there is no good reason why not, given the technologies that many schools now have at their fingertips), this would mean that small children could in this way already begin to carry out their first international projects. Hmmm.

In the event that the school teams work in different languages, the machine translation interface here might also be a useful part fo their international cooperation and sharing experience.

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