WeatherSTEM Station gets Fairfax elementary students excited about weather
FAIRFAX, Va. (ABC7) — You can hear the excitement in their voices as students discuss the various aspects of weather. Ten-year-old Lilia Kim is fourth grader at Willow Springs Elementary School in Fairfax.
"There's like the wind pressure and air pressure and wind speed and normally when people think of weather they don't think of that," she shared.
Students are thinking about it now thanks to the recent arrival of a WeatherSTEM station. Sixth grader Naveen Sasikumar had never seen anything like it. "When I first saw it we were all thinking,'What is that?'" he recalled.
Tori Scheidt, a former student at Willow Springs, came up with the idea to bring the weather station to the school. "I thought it would be so cool to get students at a young age interested in sciences," she said.
Nine-year-old Jason Yoo is considering studying meteorology some day. "It's really helpful to have one this close to our school so you can know exactly what temperature it is, what to wear and what to expect," he explained.
Students can access live data about rainfall, lightning strikes and wind speed. The weather station even has a cloud camera and a device that uses sensors to measure soil moisture. Science Teacher Terri Kidwell thinks the data the station provides is invaluable. "Whenever we study our weather we have a whole weather unit and we can actually learn from the weather data," she said.
