This study was grounded in the spatial computational thinking model developed by the "3D Weather" project funded by the NSF STEM+C program. The model reflects a discipline-based perspective towards computational thinking and captures the spatial nature of computational thinking in meteorology and the reliance of computational thinking on…

The Precipitating Change Project was a 5-year development, implementation, and research study of an innovative 4-week middle school curricular unit in computational weather forecasting that integrates students' learning and use of meteorology and computational thinking (CT) concepts and practices. The project produced a list of CT skills and…

On July 16, 1988, Florence Griffith Joyner (FGJ) shattered the women's 100-m dash world record (WR) with a time of 10.49 s, breaking the previous mark by an astonishing 0.27 s. By all accounts FGJ dominated the race that day, securing her place as the premiere female sprinter of that era, and possibly all time. In the aftermath of such an…

As teachers we are encouraged to contextualize the mathematics that we teach. In this article, Belinda Beaman explains how she used the weather as a context for developing decimal understanding. We particularly enjoyed reading how the students were involved in estimating.

Does having more knowledge or interest in the topics used in example problems facilitate or hinder learning in statistics? Undergraduates enrolled in Introductory Psychology received a lesson on central tendency. Following the lesson, half of the students completed a worksheet with a baseball cover story while the other half received a weather…

By means of a simple mathematical model recently developed by the authors (2010 "Phys. Educ." 45 641), the passage of the seasons on the Earth is simulated for arbitrary latitudes, taking into account sunlight attenuation in the atmosphere. The method developed can be used to predict a realistic value of the solar energy input (insolation) that…

Weather forecasting consists of two processes, model integration and analysis (data assimilation). During the model integration, the state estimate produced by the analysis evolves to the next cycle time according to the atmospheric model to become the background estimate. The analysis then produces a new state estimate by combining the background…

The purpose of this activity was to help students understand the percentage of cloud cover and make more accurate cloud cover observations. Students estimated the percentage of cloud cover represented by simulated clouds and assigned a cloud cover classification to those simulations. (Contains 2 notes and 3 tables.)

Describes a set of activities designed to help students determine whether walking or running in the rain will keep you drier. Includes a range from simple to sophisticated formulas that attempt to consider a number of variables and some basic laws of physics in the calculations. (TW)