Stream Monitoring Team

Meet the members of the stream monitoring team.  They are left to right Yixin Gu(graduate student), Deliah Johnson, Zac Bunn and Michael McEver. Zac is the lead teacher for the project and is bringing his experience from working on the stream project last summer.  They are building a sensor cluster that contains pH, dissolved oxygen, a thermistor as was done last year but adding a ultrasonic sensor to help with detecting the water level which they will be observing as a control.  Only one cluster was build last year, they will now have  a total of five sensor clusters to use in their artifical streams designed for testing water quality. 

In the picture here you can see an example of their sensor cluster to be used in the artificial stream.


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Air Quality Team

Meet the Air Quality Team composed of Dave Parsons and Georgette Jordan.  Their project idea began with trying to design a carbon dioxide sensor along with an amplifier/filter added to it to capture the level of carbon dioxide in a room.  If the level went to a certain high level then a fan would be switched on to dissapate the carbon dioxide to a lower level. 


Here is an example of a prototype room that Dave designed to test the carbon dioxide sensor.

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The Wildlife Monitoring Team

Meet the Girl Power group composed of teachers Lori Wolf, Jennifer Williams(Graduate Student), Raechelle Jones, and Chelsea Meyer.  Their project is designed around reducing power consumption on a SWAN surveilance camera system.  Ardurino wireless network sytems will be used to code for motion detection.  They are trying to get set the camera system to record only when motion is detected which will help with power consumption.  Their field research will be  putting these cameras in artifical habitats to observe various animals at the Isle du Bois at Lake Ray Roberts.  They will be running trials on grid then hopefully creating  an off grid system reducing power consumption using solar panels.

The teachers with the help of their beloved graduate student took a quick course in Schematics 101 so that they could understand the electrical system of the cameras. 

                                         


 Here is an example of an artificial habitat that they will use with the cameras to monitor motion. 







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Welcome to RET Summer 2013

 Hello my name is Dawn Chegwidden and welcome to my first time

 at creating a blog. I have been teaching for 22 years now so I now have

become a seasoned teacher as some say in the education field after surviving so long. My enthusiasm for helping shape young minds of teenagers has not changed nor the inspiration to always remember that learning is constant and don't worry your brain will not explode. 

 

I am very excited to be a part of the RET program for the third time.  This time I will take on the role as teacher mentor for three research groups.  I will be involved with the stream monitoring, air quality and wildlife monitoring teams.  I am looking forward to the unique projects and ideas that each group comes up with during this session.  I hope to gain some beneficial skills to pass along to my students so that they will consider entering engineering fields in college where there is a demand currently.  

 

 

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