5th-Graders Give Rainwater the Acid Test

With the help of a high-tech computer program and some low-tech rain-collector cups, 31 fifth-graders in Culver City have become experts on acid rain.

The Farragut Elementary School class is one of nearly 500 classes throughout the world catching rain in homemade collectors, testing it for acidity and then pooling the information via computer as part of a six-week project run by the National Geographic Society.

Ask the students about their topic and they’ll deluge you with the gritty facts: Car tailpipes, coal-burning smokestacks and chimneys release sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides. The gases react with sunlight and moisture to form acids, which fall back to earth in rain. The acid rain kills fish and has pitted a marble wall of the U.S. Capitol.

As student Benjamin Yun notes, “If there is too much acid in the rain water, it can damage crops, buildings, statues, cars.”

The six-week project is now in its final week, and teacher Kelley Roberts says the children have come a long way in that time. At the outset, “they just really didn’t know” what acid rain was, she said. “They hadn’t even known what acid was.”

The acid rain experiment is a unit of study in the National Geographic Kids Network, a $5-million program designed to teach science and geography to elementary-school children. The network was launched last year by the National Geographic Society, with help from Technical Education Research Centers in Cambridge, Mass., and the National Science Foundation.

The current acid rain study is the second conducted by the network, said Jane Tully, a National Geographic Society spokeswoman. Signing up to participate this spring were 481 classes, including ones in Whittier,

Westlake Village, Glendora and Orange County, as well as in the rest of the United States, Puerto Rico, Canada, Zambia, Moscow, Japan, Singapore and Indonesia.

Schools pay $445 for the computer software, materials and telecommunications time. One goal of the program is to show children how science and geography are “open-ended pursuits” and to pose to them “questions real scientists are asking,” Tully said. Instead of sitting glassy-eyed through a lecture, the students work in teams, collect data and employ the methods real scientists use, she said.

Future hands-on projects available through the Kids Network, Tully said, will address weather, waste disposal and drinking-water quality.

For Roberts’ students, the biggest hit of the program is the Apple II GS computer and its software. “It has really good graphics and music,” said fifth-grader Nick Tallant.

Via the computer, the class and the other participating schools have sent acid rain data to National Geographic and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, where scientists analyze it and compile charts and maps. The computer-generated maps, which can show the entire world or zoom in on one state, are color-coded magenta, bright yellow and other vibrant shades according to the local pH readings.

Because the children’s equipment is not as precise as that used by professionals, the experiment is primarily benefiting the students rather than breaking new ground in the study of acid rain, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration scientist Richard Artz said.

Some of the results, however, are being looked at with interest. “We do get some readings from pretty strange places,” he said, explaining, for instance, that the Indonesian school’s data is the first that he’s ever seen from that country.

The Culver City class and other U.S. schools also swapped letters by computer describing the industries and transportation systems in their communities. Traffic, Roberts’ students wrote, is “busy in all directions in Los Angeles.”

The rain collectors fashioned by the students are not as high-tech. Though the contraptions look haphazard--plastic cups taped to scraps of wood, to shoe boxes, to the mouth of a spaghetti sauce jar--they took some thought. They had to be stable, and they had to be “high enough so a puddle wouldn’t flick dirt into the cup” and skew the results, said Frank Castro, 10.

And, Castro pointed out, “you can’t touch the rim or inside (of the cup) because grease from your fingers (will) contaminate it.”

To the delight of the students, it rained three times in April. But they were surprised--and a bit disappointed--that despite Los Angeles’ famed smog, the litmus paper turned apple-green, which correlated to between 5.5 and 6.0 on the pH scale and meant that the rain was only slightly more acidic than cow’s milk. “I was hoping that there would be acid rain so I could say L.A. has lots of pollution,” Tallant said.

The students’ results, however, are supported by data obtained with more sophisticated equipment, said Artz, a physical scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Silver Spring, Md., who is working on the acid rain project.

Los Angeles may spew a lot of pollutants into the air, but wind carries it to other places such as Arizona and New Mexico, he said. “The wind does wonderful things for L.A. in terms of acid precipitations.”

The letters from other classes brought more revelations to the Culver City fifth-graders, whose perceptions tend to be “so limited to where we live,” teacher Roberts said. A few were surprised to learn that Nabisco Inc. and the Coca-Cola Co. are based in the Eastern part of the country. “I thought they’d be here,” LaKira Vance said, because Coke and Oreos are “things you find in California stores.”

Rain in Zambia tested acidic because of a practice there of burning vegetation. Tallant was amazed that a school in Africa would even have computers. “I didn’t think there were that many people in Africa. I’m surprised they even heard of (Kids Network). I don’t consider them up-to-date,” he said.

Roberts’ students also are examining their home environment. John Barker, 11, spent a lunch period on the phone with a Chevron refinery representative in El Segundo, discussing scrubbers and oil-eating bacteria. Other students have interviewed officials at Sees Candies, as well as personnel at the General Motors plant in Van Nuys and at Los Angeles International Airport to learn about the pollutants those operations produce.

The project even reached into kitchen cupboards, with the children reading labels to find out that Dr. Pepper, Pop Tarts, jalapenos, pancake syrup and stewed tomatoes contain various acids.

Although some students grumbled about having to write their observations in a journal or that the experiment seemed to last too long, most declared the project interesting. Roberts said she has noticed more enthusiasm about science and increased cooperation among classmates.

The children also have developed many suggestions on how to reduce acid rain: Industries can switch to low-sulfur coal, and people can have their “cars regularly tuned so smog doesn’t come up” and can walk or bicycle to the store instead of drive, Vance said. In the future, they can drive solar-powered cars, Yun said. Smokers can even help out by kicking the habit, George Antoun noted.

Some students are lobbying their parents. Tallant said he told his parents that it seemed wasteful to take two cars on a beach outing just so that one parent could return early. Vance has suggested a car pool to her mother and godmother, who work at the same place. Lamar Robinson said he has persuaded his father to ride the bus to work.

“If we don’t do something about it, (the Earth) is just gonna get messed up,” said Frank Castro. “You see what’s happened to the ozone layer.”