Final Report - December, 2003

Our school's name is Evansville Day School. We live in Evansville, Indiana, a small city in southern Indiana. Our location is 38 degrees North latitude, 87 degrees West longitude. We are in the 6th grade, and we are doing this project for our Science class. During the project our class did a lot of research and investigation. To do our part to submit data at the website, every day one of our classmates went outside to check our thermometer hanging in the shade to determine the temperature. We calculated the temperature in Celsius degrees and recorded it on our data chart. We then went to the Navy Observatory website to write down the sunrise and sunset for that day. We then calculated the number of minutes of daylight and determined the average temperature and daylight for the five days of the week, November 3 -7, 2003. We then went to the website that is the home of the Sun Times project and each student picked out ten or more schools from North and South of the equator. We typed the schools and their data into a spreadsheet and plotted that information on two graphs. The graphs told us a lot about latitude vs. daylight and latitude vs. temperature. It showed us the similarities and differences for various locations for this project. We found out that latitude affects the area's minutes of daylight directly. The more degrees South of the equator you are during November, the more the minutes of daylight increase. The farther North you go, the minutes decrease. There was a definite straight line of best fit. We determined that this is because the earth's axis is tilted so that the sun's direct rays shine more on the Southern hemisphere, making their days longer at this time of the year. There is a relationship between latitude and temperature, too. However, it is a different one. The graph for latitude vs. temperature showed that it is hottest closest to the equator. But, starting at the equator, if you travel North or South the temperature decreases creating a curved line on our graph. We also noticed that there were locations that did not fit the curved line on this graph. When researching those locations we decided that other things such as altitude and closeness to oceans and other large bodies of water also affect temperature. We learned a lot about the relationship between minutes of daylight, temperature and latitude while doing this project. We learned that the minutes of daylight for our location decreased exactly two minutes each day during that week. We also learned a lot about the temperature at locations all around the world. If we did the project again we would collect data for a longer period of time to see if that affected the average. We would also plot more locations into our spreadsheet to see if the they supported the line of best fit. This was a great project and it was interesting to see how schools all around the world are using computers.

E-mail: mkraft@evansvilledayschool.org