AmericaView Blog

Hello everyone out there in blog land!

My name is Dirk Anderson Jr. and as my companions Ross and Janeen have already mentioned, I’m a graduate student with the University of Idaho, doing most of my schooling at the McCall Outdoor Science School (MOSS). As part of our schooling we were assigned various assistantships and I was fortunate enough to be selected to work with some remote sensing (RS) technologies and design a curriculum for middle school and/or high school students. The “toys” I get to play with are called
radiometers, which are a spectral reflectance sensor (SRS) designed and produced by Decagon Devices in Pullman, WA. These radiometers look at several different bands of light with two different types of sensors indices; Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) and Photochemical Reflectance Index (PRI). My goal is to produce a lesson plan using these SRSs that will not only introduce the concept of light reflectivity, but also produce a more meaningful and context way to teach students about the visible light spectrum using cutting edge technologies.

As Ross and Janeen have already mentioned we are currently touring the northwest making stops in Lapwaii and Moscow, ID and Pullman and Seattle, WA to visit a range of professionals in the RS,
education, and consulting fields. After our stop in Lapwaii on Monday, we headed up to Moscow to visit with several U of I grad students in the education field. During our talk with Becky, Ryan and Audrey over a cup of coffee at the One World coffee shop, we covered some successes and difficulties with teaching sciences at the K-12 level. They got me really excited when they told me about the work that they have been doing. Previously called the GK12 program, they have been working on pairing graduate students with teachers to help build a stronger learning and teaching environment. If I’m lucky enough, I hope to find myself in this program in the future.

The next day we were able to meet with our friend and former orientation instructor, Troy Magney, who’s a Ph. D student at the U of I in RS. Troy also was a part of the MOSS program a few years back, so his insight was extremely helpful. We spent most of the day with Troy as we set up and ran a scan with a Terrestrial Laser Scanner, talked about his research, and toured a farm where several different SRSs were set up. Troy has already been a great help on my project and idea development and I look forward to continue working with him.

Well that’s all for now. Tomorrow we’re headed to Decagon Devices to see where my radiometers come from.

Cheers!

Dirk Jr.