By Sherry F. Pruitt

JONESBORO — The scene: 22 schoolteachers, a bottle of helium, a roll of duct tape and three party balloons are in 96-degree heat in a parking lot on the ARKANSAS STATE UNIVERSITY campus Wednesday.

Behind the scene: Two ASU professors use grants to train Northeast Arkansas science and math teachers in experiments they can share with high school students in their classrooms this fall.

ASU, Williams Baptist College and the Northeast Arkansas Education Service Cooperative in Walnut Ridge partnered to offer the teacher training this summer, Dr. Mike Hall, assistant professor of math at ASU, said.

The training program, which pairs math and science teachers at area school districts to benefit students, is funded by a $350,000 grant through the Arkansas Department of Education in conjunction with the federal No Child Left Behind Act of 2001.

Teachers who focus on physical and life sciences and math from a dozen school districts, such as Maynard, Jackson County, Hoxie, Twin Rivers and Corning, are participating.

The teachers spent a week at Williams Baptist under the direction of biology professor Melissa Hobbs and math instructor Lana Rhoads, followed by a week at ASU. The final portion of the program will be in the teachers’ respective classrooms in the fall, Hall said. That’s when Hall and Dr. Tillmon Kennon, assistant professor of science education at ASU, will visit the school districts to follow up on the summer participants. They will team-teach and provide model lessons to teachers.

On the ASU campus and inside the Lab Science East Building, teachers were studying the atmospheric pressure of helium and calculating the temperature versus time, Hall said. Earlier in the week they built hand-held receivers from scratch.

On Wednesday Kennon launched a helium-filled party balloon carrying a transmitter designed to send signals to the participants in the parking lot, Hall said. A test launch was conducted, followed by two “cricketSats,” a low-cost measuring devices equipped with a plastic parachute secured with duct tape to ease the balloon back to the Earth’s surface.

“The hotter it is, the shorter between cricket chirps or between transmissions,” Kennon said. “Teachers plotted temperatures for three known intervals: room-temperature, outside and iced.”

On Wednesday afternoon they were scheduled to make a calibration curve.

Last year, Kennon said, the temperature changed at about 20,000 feet.

“These (balloons) can go 20,000 to 30,000 feet. The trick is to find the line between too much and not enough helium,” he said.

Kennon has launched seven, two of which have been returned. One was found in Jackson, Tenn. Contact information is included.

The grants provide teachers with a stipend, as well as materials so they can duplicate the experiment in their physical science and algebra classes, Hall said. The project takes three or four weeks of preparation, launch day and a week for evaluations, he added.

“It’s a good, rich activity,” Hall said.

“As science teachers, we’re learning to work with math teachers to develop activities,” said George Mitchell, a science teacher at Tuckerman High School, part of the Jackson County School District. “We can use this in both classes.”

Jeri Mullen, a math teacher at Hoxie High School, said she was learning better ways to make her students see the benefits of mathematics by tying it in with science.

“They always ask me why math is important,” Mullen said. “They’ll see math is really beneficial.”

sherry@jonesborosun.com