Fernandez, a first year master's student in biology at Wake Forest, posts the latitude, longitude and other information for each bird to the schools and filters questions and comments from students for Anderson and other members of the research team.
"Every person who subscribes and gets some benefit makes me happy," Anderson said. "It (the listserv) can be as big as it wants to be. Who would have thought a kid could, in their class or at home, collect data on chlorophyll concentrations in the open ocean and see what is different about the places the birds go and where they don't go?
"These birds have never been satellite tracked before, so they are finding out the answer to the big question, 'Where do they go when they leave the nesting site?' along with us."
The data from Anderson's study is also being distributed by the Galaxy Classroom to its 600 subscribing elementary schools in the continental United States, to another 600 fifth- and sixth-grade classrooms in the Hawaii State Teleschool through the KidScience television program, and to several schools in the Winston-Salem/Forsyth County system in North Carolina.
"One of our goals is to help students learn science by doing science," said Bill Schmitt, director of the Galaxy Classroom, which provides programming in science and language arts to classrooms. "Through The Albatross Project, students are doing science right along with scientists in the field," he said.
"This is really one of the most exciting projects for kids at this age level that I've seen because it's almost impossible to get the opportunity to do that."
Patty Miller, the Hawaii Sta
'"/>
Contact: Wayne Thompson
thompsow@wfu.edu
910-758-4393
Wake Forest University
5-Jan-1998