Final Report - June, 2003

We are members of Class 6 & our school is located at Cape Byron, the most easterly point of mainland Australia.

Each day during the project week we collected the following information: sunrise & sunset times; number of sunlight hours; high & low tide times; maximum daily temperature; amount of daily precipitation; moon phase. Collecting the information generated a lot of discussion around hours of sunlight, temperature & tidal patterns.

After receiving the spreadsheet of results from all the participating schools, we decided to look at ten schools in our classwork. We chose all the southern hemisphere schools together with northern hemisphere schools ranging from latitude 2.5N to 53.2N. We were interested to see the differences & similarities between the results from these ten schools. We created hypotheses in our efforts to explain the data & then checked references to see if we were correct. For us longer days means more warmth & so we were surprised to realize that the amount of sunlight hours at the equator, where it is always warm, is pretty constant all year round, while Alberta, which experienced the most hours of sunlight, did not record the highest temperatures. We also spent a lot of time discussing the fact that Antarctica is experiencing darkness now, while the north pole is experiencing light. The fact that the earth is tilted was regularly explored, as was the fact that during our summers the earth is actually closer to the sun than at this time of the year.

We had lots of fun, lots of discussions, learnt to draw graphs, record data & make hypotheses. Thanks everyone for participating.

E-mail: kel@mullum.com.au