Great White (Northern) Science – LINKS and a CHALLENGE

By Claire Eamer

There’s lots of great science happening in the Great White North. (Actually, it’s not very white today – gorgeous fall colours instead – but you know what I mean.) And a lot of that science is being done by Northerners themselves. So I decided to spread the word.

Here’s the LINKS bit: I’ve dug out a few kid/teacher/librarian-friendly links for you. You’ll find them below, with short notes about where they lead.

And here’s the CHALLENGE bit: Hey, all you Northerners, scientists, science freaks (that’s me!), geeks (young and old), and wizards of Google-fu - let’s find some more! If you have a favourite science link to something that’s taking place in northern Canada, post it in the Comments section at the bottom. We can build something here.

So, here’s my first kick at the can - a mostly-but-not-entirely Yukon contribution.

This scimitar cat once roamed the Yukon grasslands. Today,

it snarls at visitors to the Yukon Beringia Interpretive Centre

in Whitehorse. Claire Eamer photo

Would you like to learn about the amazing animals that roamed the Yukon 20,000 years ago, when most of Canada was buried under kilometres of ice? Check out the Yukon Beringia Interpretive Centre's Education Corner. There's everything from educational materials for senior grades to colouring sheets for the little kids. And check back regularly. I was talking to the Beringia Centre folk yesterday, and they're planning some great new additions to the site.

If I've got you hooked on mammoths, giant sloths, and scimitar cats, there's more information about the latest research (and lots of cool photos) in the online (pdf) booklets Ice Age Klondike and Ice Age Old Crow, published by the Yukon Government.

By the way, if you want to know what life is like today at Old Crow, the Yukon's most northerly community and home of the Vuntut Gwitchin First Nation, check out the community website. It offers a sampler of the Gwich'in language, traditional stories, culture, history, cooking (lots of caribou recipes!), and a whole lot of other entertaining bits and pieces of information, including a collection of videos made by Old Crow students.

Back to ice ages and climate: how about climate change? The climate is warming faster in the North than anywhere else in Canada. What do northerners think about that? In 2000, the Inuvialuit people of Banks Island talked about their lives and how climate change is affecting them in a video called Inuit Observations of Climate Change, which is online in both a short version and a long version.

All that warming has turned up a few surprises. High in the  mountains of the Yukon and the Northwest Territories, there are patches of permanent ice, too small to be glaciers but too big to melt over the short summer. Until recently. Now many of them are melting and revealing a record of plant, animal, and human life going back thousands of years. I blogged about the ice patch discoveries here last year. The online (pdf) booklet The Frozen Past has both information and photos of Yukon finds. And Archaeology magazine has an online article about ice patch finds in other parts of the world.

For first-hand accounts at what it's like to live and do research at the northwest edge of Canada, check out this series of podcasts produced by the Wildlife Management Advisory Council (North Slope). You'll find everything from elder Danny C. Gordon's account of a lifetime of travel across the Yukon North Slope and park ranger Richard Gordon's song in praise of Herschel Island to permafrost researcher Chris Burn's musings on using both scientific and traditional knowledge to understand the land and its future.

Okay, that's my contribution - for now. I won't promise not to come back and add more links in the Comments section, but I'll let you guys have a chance first. What's your favourite science link for the North? And don't think just about the northern territories. Besides the Yukon, the Northwest Territories, and Nunavut, there's Labrador, Nunavik, and the northern regions of most of the provinces. Have I left anyone out? If so, add it in below.

Of Lego and Lab Reports

by L. E. Carmichael

When I'm not home writing kids' books, I work at the Saint Mary's University Writing Centre in Halifax. Our mission is to help students become better writers, and since I

• taught lab courses as a grad student,
• published a dozen professional papers from my PhD research,
• am the Writing Centre's official science nerd,

I'm in charge of the Lab Report Workshop.

Proof students are actually listening!

Many students hate writing lab reports. They don't see the point of recapping an experiment whose results are known a priori, and many of them are dismayed to discover that writing is a part of science at all. As one told me in a tone of abject disgust: "I didn't go in to science because I wanted to learn to spell."

As science educators, how do we get students excited, not just about doing experiments, but communicating their results?

I usually start my workshops by telling students how lab reports were invented - by chemist Robert Boyle, who in 1660 cofounded the Royal Society of London, where scientists met to share their experiments and discuss their ideas. For those who couldn't attend meetings, Boyle reasoned, why not write stuff down? That way, scientists all over the world would be able to repeat new experiments and see the results for themselves.

Once my students understand that lab reports aren't just for marks, they're how professional scientists talk to each other, I break out the Lego.

That's right, I said Lego.

Never too old to play with Lego

Each group gets 6 pieces and 15 minutes. They record their steps as they build something. Then they break it down and pass the components, and instructions, to the next group. Each group gets 15 minutes to repeat the build based on the written Methods.

I can't take credit for this idea, which the Centre's director encountered at a conference. I can tell you that it works like a charm. In a haze of childhood nostalgia, students play with toys, competing to see who can create the most interesting design from their alloted pieces. After the switch, among good-natured ribbing about illegible handwriting and sabotaged instructions, they suddenly realize just how much detail a Methods section needs to make an experiment truly reproducible. And while they came to the workshop skeptical and bored, they leave still talking about it.

What about you, science teachers? How do you get your kids excited about lab reports? How do you teach them the difference between Results and Discussion, and what information goes where? Share your strategies in the comments - I'm always looking for a new approach!

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L. E. Carmichael writes for K-12 on everything from gene therapy to hybrid cars. Coming August 2013: FOX TALK: How Some Very Special Animals Helped Scientists Understand Communication