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Challenge Team Interim Report

Team Number: 065 School Name: Central High School Area of Science: Environmental Project Title: A River Runs Through It

This year we are continuing to work hard on our project. The main purpose of our program is still to interpolate the radiation content between the inputted known values. Our Supercomputers project has made many progressions while also being altered immensely. Our team members have continued researching, and programming is also continuing in hopes of simplifying the code. Everything is going smoothly as we are learning and coming close to the finishing point on our project.

With cooperation from teachers and sponsors, equipment and help has been readily available. The GPS unit has become very familiar and widely worked with. A physics teacher, Mr. Pyle, has often invited group members to his class to learn and work with the GPS unit. More equipment being used is the radiation probes. Our group has learned how to get accurate radiation readings, save them, and again retrieve the values.

The original plan with our supercomputers project, A River Runs Through It, was to get radiation values from twelve water samples along the San Juan River in Kirtland. The plan, however, has changed. Learning that the radiation probes available for use cannot test water, we decided to test the shoreline along the river. Another variable that has changed is the location where the samples will be collected. Shiprock, a town nearby, is known to have very high radiation readings, so we plan on taking six samples there. Six samples will also be taken from Kirtland so as to be able to compare high and low contents. Using these differing locations, we hope to get more varied results.

This past weekend we actually got to go out and begin taking GPS and radiation readings. Due to the accuracy of the equipment, problems arose and kept us from finishing. We have come up with a solution to the problem. To get more true results, we plan on using the GPS to give us the location and thereafter taking three readings with the radiation probes to get a more accurate average. This means that a total of twelve points will be plotted with the GPS unit and a total of 36 radiation probe readings will be taken. In order to interpolate values between our taken points, the original values must be very accurate. By taking three radiation values and computing the average, we hope to make our project more informative.

The GIS unit continues to be the last area of our project. After gathering all our GPS points and radiation values, the GIS will be used to map the points and show the content at each. Using this process, our results will be clearly understood and easily seen. For this section of research, we plan on contacting Dr. Doug Isely who followed our project last year. He has advanced and sophisticated equipment that he has offered to let us use and help with.

Our group members are working well together. We have some new members this year, but they are very interested in the project and have done much researching on radiation. The C++ code continues to work with imaginary values but we are waiting to input the final GPS points and radiation contents. We are having fun with our project and continuing to learn immensely.

Team Members

Team Mail

• Carrie Hawkins
• Kendal Hathaway
• Mandie Manning
• Tyler Merrill

Sponsoring Teachers

• Janet Clafton
• James Karlin

Project Advisor(s)

• Matt Pyle
• Janet Clafton