UtSTA 2024: Out-Of-This-World Science Teaching

Resources:

i-Tree
Not Even Past: Social Vulnerability and the Legacy of Redlining
Urban Heat Island Story Map
National Phenology Network


Practices: My presentation will describe the 2023 Heat Mapping Campaign in Salt Lake City funded by NOAA. Scientists designed routes and modeling methods, and volunteers attached mobile sensors to their cars and drove the routes. In class, students use Infrared thermometers to map the heat island effect around their campus.

Crosscutting Concepts: Our results revealed that historically redlined neighborhoods on the Westside experience a greater heat burden than other neighborhoods. Our results will improve our ability to build effective heat mitigating infrastructure like trees and cool roofs.

Core Ideas: In studying the urban heat island effect, students learn that the Earth’s surface absorbs or reflects solar radiation. When the surface absorbs solar energy, heat is transferred by conduction, convection, evaporation, and emission. Human bodies respond to heat with perspiration and vasodilation. Heat waves are becoming more common and more severe, and the burden of risk is not equally shared.