WeatherBug program turns snow into learning

Feb. 13, 2007
By JOSEPH M. DELEON News-Post Staff
jdeleon@fredericknewspost.com

  FREDERICK — While many people associate snow with school closures, a Germantown company is turning weather events into learning experiences.
     WeatherBug, which has about 8,000 weather tracking stations and more than 1,000 weather cameras at schools and public safety buildings, is known for its computer desktop program that displays live weather information.
     The company is also gaining recognition as a leader in interactive learning with the WeatherBug Achieve program.
     Frank McCathran, manager of WeatherBug education, said the program combines the real-time information with interactive lessons.
     “The neat thing from a teaching per spective is that it was always difficult to engage students,” he said. “But weather is one of those hooks because they can see it when they play baseball or feel it when they wait for the bus.”
     When the company started 15 years ago, WeatherBug helped schools make learning math relevant to children.
     In 1992, the Internet was not widespread, so each weather station was connected to an isolated terminal on site.
     Weather data was printed and then analyzed in math classes. The experience helped elementary school children relate to the numbers, because they felt the weather, collected the data and crunched the numbers.
     In the late 1990s, WeatherBug began to link the stations together.
     “With schools being wired to the Internet, educational software was developed to bring all those data to life in social studies, math, science and now technology ed,” McCathran said. “Now, instead of just mapping raw data sets, we have lesson plans that change automatically based on the data collected from the stations — the answers are based on the weather happening right now, so it's a new lesson every day.”
     The newest component of the program lets 4th- through 8thgrade students create their own weather-related computer programs.
     WeatherBug rolled-out an application development tool last year to several schools, which allows students to code a desktop application, similar to the WeatherBug desktop program.
     “Students can now develop their own application, but they don't need to know a programing language, you just need to know how to make calls” he said. “It's not just science education, now we're talking technology education — They're making Weather-Bugs of their own.”
     Students use simple commands to write a script that makes use of the WeatherBug's network of users and match it up with other weather data.
     For instance, students might use weather data collected at their school and match it up with images collected from a radar map.
     McCathran hopes it will give students the ability to pave the way for developing tools Internet users want.
     “People use it to protect life, even in times of civil emergency,” he said. “But it also makes it fun to come to work everyday knowing children are using it for fun and education.”