The first objective outlined in the proposal was to develop and deliver an integrated geoscience course, Environmental Inquiry, to Upward Bound students in West Virginia. On June 19, this course began for 32 Upward Bound students in grades 9 and 10.

Upward Bound is designed to assist low income first generation students to be the first in their families to not only attend, but to graduate from college. The 32 students who enrolled in the Environmental Inquiry course came from the counties of Kanawha, Fayette, Lincoln, Boone and Putnam in rural West Virginia and were 56% African American, 85% female, and 91% first-generation/low-income. The course ran for 6 weeks with approximately 22 days of instruction. Geoscience instruction included topics included in the GLOBE program.

To facilitate the instruction for the summer course, several GLOBE materials were purchased or borrowed from the NASA IV&V Educator Resource Center. The course utilized a classroom set of GPS units borrowed from the ERC. Various materials are required for taking GLOBE measurements.

The list below summarizes the materials purchased in year 1 which will be utilized by IDGE students in year 1 and year 2:

Active Learning with GPS Instruments

Since the GLOBE program requires detailed GPS measurements to record the location of environmental measurements, students began the course learning and exploring with GPS units. Each student had to use his or her own unit to locate waypoints and to take latitude/longitude measurements around the campus of WVSU. They then utilized their mathematical and geometry skills to predict and then verify with detailed calculations the distances between points across campus. Their calculations were utilized to verify their choice of closest and farthest points from the Science Building.

The rest of the summer was spent conducting data collection and analysis formulated around GLOBE program protocols in the following investigation areas:

• Hydrology
• Atmosphere
• Phenology

Anatomy of Our Instructional Day

The following table summarizes each instructional day and the topic of discussion. Most days also included student work on the GLOBE website. These assignments were created in hopes that the students would become more comfortable utilizing the GLOBE website and on-line data manipulation. The on-line assignments were also given as a strategy to deal with different rates of student completion on the regular in-class assignment.