Recently we finished a big project called Mystery Class. It's sponsored by a program called Journey North which is an organization that tracks migration patterns of various animals and helps students learn about these patterns as well. The Mystery Class activity involves trying to discover the mystery locations of 10 different sites around the world by using the changing amount of daylight (which helps to determine the latitude) as well as clues about longitude, geography, and culture. We started working on this project at the end of January. We had no idea what it was going to be like, but it turned out to be really fun.
Here are the mystery locations:
Here are pictures of some of the tools we used during this project... our world map and atlas:
...our charts that we used to keep track of the amount of daylight in each place. Also, we had a chart to figure out the longitude of each location.
...our graphs that showed how much daylight each mystery class had each week. The number of hours of daylight is on the left side and across the bottom are the dates.
If the line is going up, that location is gaining daylight meaning it is in the northern hemisphere. If the line is going down, that location is losing daylight meaning it is in the southern hemisphere. At first we thought Mystery Class #5 would only have a tiny bit of daylight because for the first few weeks it had no daylight at all. But it turned out to be the fastest gainer, gaining about an hour and a half to two hours each week (one week it gained 3 hours!). From the start we knew that Mystery Class #7 was going to be a fast loser (of daylight). We thought it was going to be on the tip of South America, but it turned out to be on the Antarctic Peninsula. We didn't know that there were any populated areas in Antarctica, so when we looked it up in Wikipedia we were really surprised. There are actually about 30 year-round residents at this research station (in the summer there are about 200 residents).
We're all looking forward to doing this project again next year!
(co-written by Madeline)
Here are the mystery locations:
- Sapporo, Japan
- Johannesburg, South Africa
- Pigeon, Michigan, U.S.
- Campina Grande, Brazil *
- Ny Alesund, Norway (in the archipelago of Svalbard north of Scandinavia)
- Kuwait City, Kuwait
- Rothera Research Station, Adelaide Island, Antarctica
- Bonn, Germany
- Chengdu, China
- Lima, Peru
*We missed this one, but we were close! We thought it was Jaboatao, Brazil. We got all the rest correct!
Here are pictures of some of the tools we used during this project... our world map and atlas:
...our charts that we used to keep track of the amount of daylight in each place. Also, we had a chart to figure out the longitude of each location.
...our graphs that showed how much daylight each mystery class had each week. The number of hours of daylight is on the left side and across the bottom are the dates.
If the line is going up, that location is gaining daylight meaning it is in the northern hemisphere. If the line is going down, that location is losing daylight meaning it is in the southern hemisphere. At first we thought Mystery Class #5 would only have a tiny bit of daylight because for the first few weeks it had no daylight at all. But it turned out to be the fastest gainer, gaining about an hour and a half to two hours each week (one week it gained 3 hours!). From the start we knew that Mystery Class #7 was going to be a fast loser (of daylight). We thought it was going to be on the tip of South America, but it turned out to be on the Antarctic Peninsula. We didn't know that there were any populated areas in Antarctica, so when we looked it up in Wikipedia we were really surprised. There are actually about 30 year-round residents at this research station (in the summer there are about 200 residents).
We're all looking forward to doing this project again next year!
(co-written by Madeline)
And while we worked on our Mystery Class project, this is the kind of thing that Sam was up to...
Gotta get that cabinet latch fixed!
