Sarah Brown
Michelle Snyder plans on making waves with her students at Sweet Home High School this year – real ones – and hopes it will be a big splash.
Both Snyder and student Megan Hager, a senior this fall, spent several weeks during the summer at the O.H. Hinsdale Wave Research Laboratory at Oregon State University. By conducting research and designing lesson plans for high school classes, they earned a grant that allowed them to purchase a 16-foot wave flume for Snyder’s classroom.
The flume will allow the marine science teacher to create and measure waves, and conduct lab experiments with her students.
“My goal as a teacher is to expose students to as much real-life scenarios as possible,” Snyder said. “The big line that every high school student gives you is, ‘When am I ever going to use this again in my life?’ I wanted to bring some coastal engineering research into my marine science class to expose students to actual, real-life research that’s happening 45 minutes away.”
Since OSU has the largest tsunami research station in the United States, people come from all over to conduct various research projects, Snyder said.
“The whole purpose of the project this summer was to look at beach erosion, and how to avoid having that happen. We were able to go there and work with researchers from around the world, but what we were doing was adapting what they were doing to a high school lab environment.”
When Snyder was offered the grant at OSU, funded by the National Science Foundation, she asked if she could bring one of her students to work with her. Organizers were hesitant at first, but weren’t disappointed in the end, she said.
“I knew I needed a highly motivated math student and a highly motivated science student to help me out. (Also), someone who’s organized and someone who can kind of take charge of a situation without me constantly having to direct them.”
As Hager and Snyder began their work, they knew right away they’d need to adapt some of the wave lab’s technology.
The lab at OSU utilizes a complicated sensor program that wouldn’t be easy to replicate or pay for at high schools, Snyder explained. Also, most SHHS classes use Chromebooks, but OSU’s sensor requires a hookup to laptops.
So Snyder contacted Vernier, a company in Portland that makes motion sensors, and ordered a Chromebook-compatible sensor that was about one-third the cost of OSU’s sensor. They didn’t even know if the sensor would work, so while they waited for it to arrive, she and Hager developed a variant of their lesson plan.
“We designed a lab that students could use with their phones,” Snyder said. “They would take a picture of a wave. We marked a meter on there, and then they could do all their calculations based on that.”
After the sensor arrived, the two set it up and began their calculations, but kept hitting a problem.
“It was off by a scale of 10 for some reason, and we could not figure out where that 10 was coming from,” Hager said.
Even Dan Cox, a professor who was leading the research, couldn’t figure it out, Snyder said. But it was Hager who found the answer.
“It turned out that it was the distance between the sensor itself and the thing, and we just forgot to factor in a part of it,” she said.
She said she was originally intimidated by Cox, but his eyes lit up when he saw she’d solved the problem. That’s when Hager realized he’s “just a normal dude.”
Vernier’s sensor program can be used on laptops, Chromebooks, and phones with Apple and Android support, so it’s very versatile, Hager said.
“With how modern and easy this is, it’s just crazy,” she said. “There’s so much we could do with it, and I’m really glad we were able to do what we did.”
Being exposed to high-level research and interacting with professionals has been a positive experience, Hager said. She was “super excited” to be given the unique opportunity, and said it was a more productive use of her time rather than just relaxing all summer.
“I love learning about things, and then to have this as an opportunity to improve myself and further my academic achievements, I’m just always interested in it,” she said.
Snyder wants other students to have a similar experience, and hopes she might be able to build herself into a sort of educational liaison for the wave lab.
She envisions a “tsunami boot camp” for teachers, and taking students to the facility so they can be exposed to coastal engineering opportunities.
“It was an amazing experience for me, and to see Megan actually take on more of a leadership academic role was just a wonderful experience. It was really nice to be able to give that experience to a student, and I hope to be able to do it in the future, as well.”