The Celebration of Earth and Atmosphere on 18 April marked NCAR's first public Earth Day event in over a decade. Serving as host site for many of the Boulder community's Earth Day activities, the Mesa Lab was home to a trout obstacle course, Ecocycle's giant earth puzzle, environmental printing, and numerous other hands-on activities dedicated to environmental education. NCAR's special events included a special traveling exhibit from the Smithsonian Institution "Diversity Endangered", a Walter Orr Roberts Weather Trail hike, and the inaugural run of the NCAR Earth Day 1K Run.
Ecocyle's Big Puzzle was a community event.
The Student Art Showcase supplemented NCAR's celebrations of Earth Day and National Science and Technology Week. For the month of April, all NCAR public galleries were devoted to student art reflecting on the National Science Foundation theme "Polar Connections." Students in grades 4-12 from throughout Boulder County were invited to submit artwork to NCAR. The NCAR Community Art Judging Committee selected seventy-five pieces for display. All displayed works received ribbons. Fourteen outstanding works received special awards. An informal awards reception honoring the students and their work closed the event. Over 220 student artists and their families attended this reception. An estimated 3,000 visitors to NCAR viewed the month long display.
Jordan Hobbs' watercolor was a special award winner at the 1998 Student Art Showcase.
Super Science Saturday, held Saturday, 7 November provided a day of informal science activities, exhibits, and science demonstrations for the public. The theme of the 1998 Super Science Saturday was "Scientific Process."
Special hands-on workshops for students (grades K-12) and their teachers were conducted in relevant areas such as Science Fair (middle school), Scientific Process (elementary), and Science Photography. NCAR scientists demonstrated fun, exciting, and compelling science principles in the Super Science Showcase, which was dedicated to Pat Kennedy, NCAR's first winner of the Outstanding Performance Award for Education. Special activity tables from Boulder's Collage Children's Museum, University of Colorado Science Discovery, the Butterfly Pavilion, the Denver Museum of Natural History, and Wild Bear Science School were on site to augment the NCAR's exhibits and displays. Nearly 1,000 students, parents, and teachers participated in Super Science Saturday. More than 200 students and teachers attended the science workshops.
NCAR's Tim Barnes intrigues students with an Exploratorium light walk activity at Super Science Saturday. It demonstrates, using common items, how electromagnetic energy, in the visible spectrum, transfers image information through space. Tim shows how the pegboard allows him to select individual images of the sun and expand them to create light patterns on the ground.
In addition, NCAR served as sponsor for the second Bayer/NSFCommunity Initiative for the Denver/Boulder area. Information was provided to local middle schools and Outreach staff acted as liaison for the students to the scientific community. The initiative challenges teams of middle school students to use science and technology to identify a community problem and develop a solution. A team from Boulder's Summit Middle School was the 1998 regional winner.
NCAR also sponsored a Colorado Department of Education "Great Expectations for Math and Science" Day where 75 teachers and parents participated in hands-on science and math activities. Staff supported Collage's Spring Break Science Workshops and the Denver Museum of Natural History's National Science and Technology Week (NSTW) event with specially designed atmospheric science activity tables.
NCAR's informal science education activities were funded, in part, by Friends of UCAR and the Scientific and Cultural Facility District (SCFD) of Colorado in collaboration with Boulder's Collage Children's Museum.
