5th graders at the Appleton Classic Charter School - March 2002
During March of 2002 Prof. Nordell piloted a program with Shawn Ford’s 5th graders at the Appleton Classic Charter School. This program helps Lawrence students ‘complete the circle’ of education by becoming teachers for a few days. This first year three Lawrence students went to Shawn Ford’s 5th grade classroom (25 kids) for a two-week experiment. The group from Lawrence including Prof. Nordell, Adam Locke, James Pfeiffelmen, and Holly Herbert went to the classroom 4 times over the two-week experiment. Alex Yuan, a sophomore at Appleton East who has worked with Prof. Nordell on the fastplants project also participated in one of the sessions with the 5th graders.The Lawrence students did the teaching and leading of the experiments with the children. The 5th graders grew fastplants in film canisters under different color LED light – to see the effects that the different color lights had on development of the plants. It was a very successful two-weeks, and we hope to expand the program to other schools and grades and be able to include more LU students. The pilot program was featured in a Post Crescent article including pictures.
The pictures above show the "planting" of a seed on a wet strip of paper towel inside the film canister, and the blue LED shining on the seed and seedling. A student is measuring the height of the plant after a given period of time, and recording observations.
Lawrence Students who helped with the Fastplants and LEDs experiments : Adam Locke, Jim Pfeiffelmann, Holly Herbert and Alex Yuan from Appleton East High.