University of Alberta students take lessons from Jasper National Park

Starting off university with a three-day trip to Jasper National Park doesn’t sound half bad, especially for keen science students who get the chance to expand their knowledge along the way.

The students are enrolled in the University of Alberta’s multi-disciplinary Science 100 class, a new, year-long course that integrates biology, chemistry, computing sciences, earth and atmospheric sciences, math, physics, and psychology. 

The course fills an entire first-year student’s timetable, with the addition of one writing course, and is intended to provide exposure to a range of subject areas. Course coordinator David Lawrie said Science 100 also offers the advantage of tweaked lesson timing, so students pick up topics in one area to complement a later lesson in another subject.

To enroll, students must first get accepted to the Faculty of Science, and then submit a statement of  interest as well as a reference letter to get into Science 100. After first year, students are credited a number of prerequisites, and therefore have a number of options when it comes to their future course of study. “They know they like science, they don’t know what area they want to go into,” he said. 

A visit to Jasper National Park in the second week of school seemed like the perfect way to give a hands-on demonstration that the course’s nine professors would later be able to tie lessons back to. “We’re taking them out at the beginning of the year and showing them a whole pile of different stuff,” Lawrie said. “And questions like, look at that mountain there, standing that way, but the one over here is this way, what happened? How did it get that way?”

Because it’s the course’s pilot year, the university funded the trip for 25 students to come to the park. “Part of it will be was this a useful approach?” Lawrie said. “Was the Jasper experience a useful thing?” If it becomes an annual feature, in future years there will be a fee for the mandatory field trip. 

Lawrie said the Science 100 professors take advantage of spontaneous learning opportunities. For instance, the students missed a lab on Sept. 10 to leave for the trip, so they did an experiment  on the way from Edmonton to demonstrate movement. When the bus accelerated, a ball hanging from a string swung towards the rear of the bus, but a helium balloon suspended on a string did the opposite. 

“This is some of the creative stuff we’re doing in Science 100, so they got a physics lab,” Lawrie said. “You could say in a lab, ‘In a car, this is what would happen,’ but here we were in the bus, driving.” They used Roche Miette as an example of of the erosion cycle, a campfire to spark a discussion about combustion, and Old Fort Point to look at Precambrian rocks in the way of a geology lesson. 

The class took advantage of sunny weather Friday morning to do a math experiment and learn about optimization. Students took turns tossing balls into a basket from different distances. Assuming each correct toss would be rewarded, they figured out the best distance from which they should toss. “It’s practical, you’d want to know your maximum payout,” said student Kaylee Bohaychuk, 17. “It gets you thinking about simple things like throwing a ball, versus the chances of a molecule forming.”

The students took to the Palisades lawn to perform their study – a spot Lawrie called perfect. “We’ve got the facilities, the food, and we can spread out and do our thing,” he said.

It will be buckle-down-and-work for the rest of the year following the trip, because although the class may continue its unique approach, they won’t take part in any activities to the scale of the trip to the park. But the visit may make the rest of the year slightly less intimidating. “It’s also a team bonding exercise,” Lawrie said. “This is not an easy class.

“Over the course of the year we’ll be returning to things and we can say ‘Remember in Jasper when we did this?’”