Collecting is cool: thanks to advances in technology, math and science teachers and students are experiencing a new, fun way to collect data during labs--whether it's in the classroom, elsewhere on campus or out in the field. (Special Advertising Section).

Each April, about half of the physics students at North Crowley High School in Fort Worth,Texas, spend a day at a local Six Flags theme park. Just another year-end class trip? Hardly. These kids are there to measure the force of the first hill on the Texas Giant roller coaster, to calculate energy changes in the Mr. Freeze ride, and to measure the centripetal acceleration in the loop on the Flashback. Oh, and they're also having fun.

At George Washington High School in Charleston, W. Va., chemistry students learn that all fires are not created equal. Through an experiment with flames from a candle, alcohol burner and Bunsen burner, they can tell which parts of a flame and which types of flames are the hottest. There's no waiting either. The data is recorded at the touch of a button, so students can spend more time analyzing and understanding that data.

From the theme park to the classroom, physics, chemistry and biology students can now perform experiments with greater accuracy and speed than ever before. While stopwatches, yardsticks and thermometers will always have their place in science, teachers agree that electronic data-collection devices and sensors are not only effective lab tools, but also more exciting and motivating for students.

"It's relevant because this is the modern way to collect data in science experiments," says Greg Dodd, a teacher at George Washington High, where the technology has been used since 1995.

Whether it's capitalizing on the latest technology or recognizing the connections between science and math, this real-world focus is at the heart of electronic data collection. At the heart of the tools used in these experiments are products developed by Texas Instruments and Vernier Software & Technology, with the help of teachers. The two firms jointly developed, for example, CBL 2, LabPro and CBR, now practically industry Standards for electronic data collection in K-12.

Anything is Possible

It's no secret that students tend to embrace technology. Rick Piercy, who teaches biology and chemistry at Yucaipa High School in California, notes that most students have grown up with handhelds, whether a computer, cell phone, or some video game device. "They learn this technology very easily," he says, adding that students often debug their own devices when they act up.

Affordable and durable, many students already own a TI graphing calculator, so schools might need only to acquire the data-collection components to rev up their science classes.

The benefits of an electronic data-collection device are quite evident to students. For example, Dodd says that often a classroom lab experiment can be done so quickly with the technology that students can do a second or third trial for more accurate results (or if an error is discovered). In the past, students spent a lot more time collecting accurate data, which left little time to analyze it.

The speed of such devices will be appreciated by any student who has spent hours plotting points on a graph so that conclusions can be drawn from an experiment. The Calculator-Based Laboratory 2 and Calculator-Based Ranger, both data-collection tools, can be connected to the TI-83 Plus graphing calculator. At the push of a button, the graph appears. "Kids learn to draw graphs in junior high school," says Kathleen Holley, chairman of the science department at North Crowley High. For her Advanced Placement students, the process of plotting points is not so important. "We're going for a higher level of information. The kids have the basic skills," she says. "When you get to AP you're looking for concepts."

Yucaipa's Piercy likes to display the data's resulting graphs on an overhead projector or TV monitor, as well. "It's a very visual hands-on," he says.

The portability of TI's data-collection devices is another plus. Holley says that a number of the physics experiments in her classes take place in the parking lot, in the cafeteria or elsewhere on campus. "Other kids see it and hear it, and physics is cool around here," she says, adding that when she started teaching at Crowley six years ago, there were 35 physics students; now there are about 250.

Many experiments can be done without the aid of an electronic device, but Dodd notes that they can easily become extremely time-consuming and tedious. In addition, with electronic data-collecting probes and sensors, there are "so many things you can do now that we didn't have the capability to do before," he says.

One example, offers Rick Sorensen, who performs research and development and provides technical support for Vernier, is the carbon dioxide gas sensor that's available for the CBL 2 product. This sensor can be used to study photosynthesis and plant respiration accurately, while in the past, data for this experiment had to be inferred.

Another sensor, which measures [O.sub.2], offers a different way to study photosynthesis and plant respiration, but yields similar results. This helps students learn the value of trying different approaches to a problem, and it encourages critical thinking.

Connecting Math and Science

One benefit that teachers are especially happy to see is the connection that students using data-collection devices are making between math and science. In Holley's physics classes, math concepts are "turned into physical realities," she says. "There's a lot of stuff that you do in math that doesn't make sense [to students]. Then you get to physics and can say, `Oh, this is why anyone would care about this!' "For instance, her students learn about parabolas by bouncing a ball off the floor.

They collect distance-time data from the bouncing ball, which is plotted by a TI graphing calculator, and a parabola fitted to the data. Students can then calculate "g" (the acceleration of gravity) for themselves, instead of looking it up or being given the information by a teacher.

In another experiment, Holley's students use electronic photo gates, tripped when an object breaks their light beam, in the hallways to record the speed of students walking by. "It's kind of like the photo finish at a horse race," she says.

For Piercy's chemistry students, an annual study of water quality in nearby streams and lakes is what brings the concepts to life. The class (sometimes accompanied by math classes and English students looking to cover the event for a local newspaper) heads out with TI graphing calculators and Calculator Based Laboratory electronic data-collection units, along with Vernier sensors and probes. The goal: tackle a real-world problem. "We spend the whole day out in the field," Piercy explains, at sites along the stream--from way up in the mountains where the water flow begins to other points downstream. "Of course we've found some significant differences," he says, "although we're not really sure what causes it."

Once back at school, students discuss the data. Some of the dissolved substances found downstream are natural, Piercy explains to them, but others are probably due to pollution. The Yucaipa students' lakes data has even been given to the local parks for further analysis. His students take their work seriously, Piercy notes, because working on a real-world problem is serious business.

These types of projects, and more too numerous to detail, can be found in the integrated classroom materials offered by both TI and Vernier on their Web sites, education.ti.com and www.vernier.com. These are ready-to-use resources, correlated to national and state-level science standards. Vernier's lab books, for example, cover biology, chemistry, physics and math for middle schools and high schools. Each has an extensive teacher's section and a CD with Windows and Mac versions of files, plus experiments, step-by-step instructions and more. (Download two free sample labs in PDF format for an early peek.)

Learning Curves

As with all technology, the biggest benefits only come when teachers embrace electronic data collection. For Piercy, who is in his 26th year of teaching, it's all about continuing to learn. "I started way back with the Apple He," he says. Piercy also considers keeping up with the latest technologies and being able to share them with his students a challenge. "I enjoy that aspect of teaching--the learning part."

Getting past the learning curve is especially challenging when there's no time to work on it.

"We're lucky if we get an hour to do that on in-service time," says Holley, who has taught workshops in data-collection technology. "What I try to do is get [participants] to try one thing, such as the motion detector. Then [on] the next pass through the curriculum we try another thing," she says. "It's one thing at a time."

Both TI and Vernier offer teacher training at schools throughout the country, says Sorensen. This training serves as an introduction to their data-collection programs and components--how they run, how to connect the pieces, etc. He remembers one workshop on respiration where a biology teacher got especially excited. "Her eyes got huge," he recalls," and she said, `You just made my year!'"

TI's professional development program is called "T-cubed," short for [T.sup.3] Teachers Teaching for Technology, and extends to 25 countries around the world. Courses for teachers, targeted at very specific topics and grade levels, can be tailored to particular needs.

"When you first start out it seems like an awful lot of work," Piercy notes, "but once you've done a few activities with your students it goes rather quickly." He was involved in a TI/Vernier summer institute this past summer, and noticed that by the end of the week, teachers really seemed to feel comfortable with the technology. "Those are the teachers who really go back and start using these during the school year," he adds.

At Yucaipa, Piercy has also been involved in linking teachers in the math and science departments. Two years ago, for example, he was teamed with a teacher of AP statistics. While the two classes were taught in their own classrooms, several times during the year the statistics students stopped by Piercy's chemistry class to tutor his students on how to analyze water-quality data. Other classes that have been linked in a similar way at Yucaipa are biology and geometry, and Algebra II and chemistry.

Coming Attractions 

Just as teachers and students rely on each other, TI and Vernier rely on teachers' feedback for developing future products. For example, Holley says she'll call the company to say "I need something that does X," and they respond with improvements. Teacher feedback, Vernier's Sorensen says," is extremely common, and both TI and Vernier build this into their product development process."

Water quality, in fact, is one area that has received a lot of recent interest. Teachers requested sensors that would log data and simplify the analysis, so Vernier has responded with new water-quality sensors plus a manual on performing water-quality experiments.

Besides being on the lookout for additional sensors, Sorensen says his company always has a pulse on the latest available and affordable technology trends that can be adapted for school use. Here's one example of how this trend watch has worked: Years ago, the auto industry used accelerometers to release the air bag during a car crash. "Initially they were expensive," Sorensen says. But as the price came down, Vernier adapted the technology for use as a physics probe. And now that sensor, along with other pieces of exciting data-collection technology, is a mainstay in many science classrooms.

Flying High With Physics

NASA calls Weightless Wonder, but to many who have experienced the feeling of reduced gravity on this aircraft, no name fits better than the Vomit Comet. Still, for the 22 student teams from Texas and New Mexico who participate in the Texas Fly High program each year, there's no better way to spend a week.

Since 1959, the Johnson Space Center's Reduced-Gravity Program has allowed astronauts to experience a true three-dimensional "weightless" training and testing environment. With Texas Fly High, eight students, their team supervisor and a mentor also make the one-and-a-half hour flight with approximately 30 zero-gravity intervals of 25 seconds each. During flights, each team conducts a micro-gravity test, either suggested by NASA mentors or of their own design.

For Kathleen Holley's team from North Crowley High School in Fort Worth, Texas, this meant using TI handhelds and data-collection technology along with sensors from Vernier Software & Technology. Team preparations included learning what strategies might help prevent motion sickness during micro-gravity. "We worked with a mentor from the [United Space] Alliance who has studied motions you can do to alleviate motion sickness," Holley says. Her students gathered in the center of a merry-go-round to find out if keeping your eyes opened or closed or keeping your head still helped to prevent motion sickness. "We did a whole week of ground testing at the playground," Holley explains.

Then it was on to Houston for more pre-flight preparations. Once in flight, Holley's students hooked up heart rate monitors to CBL 2 devices to track changes in the heart rate from the onset of the zero-gravity phase. They wanted to find out if your heart speeds up when you start floating. In addition, the students were asked to rate their feelings of motion sickness during various parts of the flight--"one" meaning you don't feel sick at all and "four" meaning "you're about to hurl," Holley laughs.