Today, five members of the UB Atmospheric Science Club (UBASC) and I visited a 9th grade class at School #38 to do our first outreach activity! We’ve been working on getting the activity ready for quite some time so it was pretty cool to finally see it in action! We couldn’t have asked for a better first class to do the activity, either! The class was attentive, asked lots of questions, and were very engaged.
The activity, which centered on UB Air Pollution (causes, magnitude of the problem, what is being done about it, and what students can do to help) consisted of two parts: A presentation, which was given by NUM undergraduate Dagii, and an interesting “back-of-the-envelope” calculation that the students performed in groups using a calculator, balloon, string, a ruler, and a little geometry. NUM undergraduate Niimka led the multi-step calculation portion. Three other undergraduates at NUM – Otgon, Lhaja, and Ashok – also played important roles by roaming the room to provide assistance to groups where needed. I was incredibly impressed by the UBASC members’ poise and leadership today; they ran the show and did a fantastic job of it!
And even before we went into the classroom, more NUM undergraduates Enkhbold and Javkhaa assisted with the translation work and helped discuss logistics.
Below are some pictures from our activity. And if you’d like to access the lesson (did I mention it involved BALLOONS?) in Mongolian or English, you can obtain them on here (Note: the files posted are not in final form – they are drafts of our materials while we were creating them – finalized files will be up in a few days).
UBASC members introducing themselves to the class.
Dagii, introducing some startling facts about UB air pollution to the class.
Niimka, leading the students through the hands-on activity.
Ashok, roaming the classroom and helping each group.
Students, blowing "one breath" into a balloon to calculate the volume of one human breath.
Lhaja, hurrying from group to group, to help students with calculations.
Students measuring the circumference of their balloon in order to ultimately calculate its volume.
Otgon assisting a student group.
Awards of completion were handed out in the end.
UBASC celebrated their first outreach activity with a yummy lunch afterwards. It was a great day!
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