Setting up an environment to enable students to accomplish real research can be daunting.  We have decided to dedicate this section to our experience at this institute in the hope of modeling how to go through a process that will lead to a finished student research project.  Throughout the rest of this description, I will refer to ourselves as the students.
      We were told to  focus our investigation on a problem in our community.  We looked at a watershed area near our school where we had previously decided to do a project with our own students.  This gave us ownership and helped to start us on our information gathering phase of the project. We new the area was rich with possible investigations and that our overall umbrella should be Hawaii's fragile environment and ecotourism.  We decided to narrow our focus on the sand dunes that border one side of the wildlife refuge that makes up the makai or ocean side of the watershed.  This area had endemic vegetation and is frequented by endangered shore birds.
        When we came to Princeton we were asked to transfer our study to the physical Princeton area.  Not wanting to travel to sand dunes we decided to revamp our project  to be doable in Princeton and Hawaii. This called for us to be both flexible and creative.  We narrowed our study to two variables,  insect populations and  water quality parameters, and devised a hypothesis.  A review session was held with our teacher to clarify exactly what we wanted to do and our experimental design.  A formal proposal was written to explain what we wanted to do and why.
        We spent the next time period gaining information and skills to help us in our team projects.  We were inserviced in the following areas:  Globe Program, Green Program, Stella Modeling, Geographical Information Services, web page construction with Netscape Composer, and use of the Internet.   We signed up individually for different programs so that we could come back together and share.  Each of us brought back to the team a different expertise, which we used to better design our project.
        In the third week we were given time to complete the experimental design and begin sampling. At this time we incorporated the knowledge gained from the different programs.  We decided that the Globe protocols for dissolved oxygen and for geopositioning would be used and that we would use the Green Program for  a quantitative measure to correlate insect larvae found and water quality.  We gathered the necessary equipment and arranged a sampling schedule.
        We ran into a few problems in gathering the necessary equipment for sampling.  We ended up designing and building our own surber net.  Money should be set aside for the purchasing of equipment needed.  Since it would be difficult to foresee how much, it would be best to set aside part of one's yearly budget and to have a good working relationship with a upper level school in the area where one might be able to borrow equipment.  Our project has both  low and high tech aspects. Some of the high tech tools used were the computers,digital cameras, and an LCD projection panel.  Most of the chemical testing was done with Hach or LaMotte kits.  We found that science can be done on a shoe string ,though, and that this is a good opportunity to address accuracy and precision.  Time was not our friend;  we only had time to do what we would describe as a field survey.  We suggest that students should do an initial sampling to give them feedback so they can improve the design of their experiment before they attempt sampling on a larger scale.  There should be deadlines established and reality checks periodically to see where everyone is to reduce stress levels.
        With the data we collected we could not answer our hypothesis.  But the process did give us a feel for the flow of gathering and analyzing information to generate a new hypothesis to get a clearer  picture of the system.  Environmental systems are multi faceted and so one would keep experimenting and adding to the picture.  We used the Stella program to model the interaction of the two variables in our experiment.  Putting our data into our model that would describe the interactions was an  excellent  tool for looking at where we needed to explore further and experiment.
        During the end of the third week we had another conference with five of the other teams and a facilitator.  We shared what we were doing and where we were having problems.  Any other groups that had information and or resources to help the other teams gave freely of their time and expertise.  This is a great way to take another look at what you are doing and to find out how  to link to other's studies.  This intercommunication was on the net, but we found that the e-mail system was not getting to everyone.  Using a list serve is another avenue to get this interplay.  We were also asked to fill in a sheet so that all of the pages that we would create could be cross referenced as to topics.
        This is our last week.  We are putting our team web page together that describes our project.  This is highly interactive, in fact, we are sitting side by side as we each construct part of the page.  We gave each other an assignment which forced us to each learn how to page compose in netscape.  We will then link to each other and edit for clarity and simplicity.  We will also follow the generic checklist given to us by the facilitators as to format and copyright.   We were also asked to fill in a sheet so that all of the team pages that we would create could be cross referenced as to subject areas by the web master.
        The facilitators have also given us the task of editing the team number in front and behind us.  This feedback will be done on hard copy and/or e-mail and given to those teams.  The last days of the project will be a seminar in which we will do a ten minute presentation with a ten minute question and answer period. We will be able to use our web page as a presentation tool. There will be refreshments, always a good idea, and breaks.

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