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Snow Camp Night Watch: Two Tent Monitors, One Cold Night

Grade 8 practice: an outdoor club's overnight log and generator test show why a digital tent monitor carries readings more reliably than an analog one.

Grade 8ScienceInteractive · Printable

Aligned toMS-PS4-3

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What’s included

Single worksheet
Auto-graded online
1 NGSS standard
Printable answer key
11 questions
Classroom-ready

Details

Format: Interactive · Printable
Grade: Grade 8
Subject: Science
Question types: Fill in the blank, Multiple choice, Matching, Circle the answer, Short answer

About this worksheet

What students practice

Students use an overnight data table to compare how an analog and a digital signal carry temperature readings.
Students explain why a weaker or noisier signal changes an analog reading but usually not a digital one.
Students argue from evidence which monitor a camp should rely on for a safety rule.

How to use

Remind students that a signal is a wave that carries information. Read paragraph 2 together and have them describe the two monitors in their own words before they open the tables.

Curriculum

NGSS standard covered

MS-PS4-3

Explain why digital signals carry information more reliably than analog signals.

Preview

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Snow Camp Night Watch: Two Tent Monitors, One Cold Night

Compare an analog and a digital tent thermometer through a freezing night and a noisy morning.

Part 1: The overnight log

Read the trip notes and study Table 1. Then answer the questions.

Trip Notes: Keeping Watch on the Tents

1Every February, the Silverpine Outdoor Club spends two nights camping in snow at a state park campground. Staying warm is the biggest safety concern, so the club leader, Ms. Annika Sandoval-Reid, keeps watch from a heated cabin about 60 m from the tents. Two eighth graders, Rafferty Osei and Maëlle Dubois, set up two wireless monitors in the same tent so that she could check its temperature without walking out in the dark.

2Both monitors have a sensor box in the tent that sends the temperature by radio to a small display in the cabin. In the analog monitor, the strength of the radio signal goes up and down with the temperature, and the display turns that strength straight into a temperature. In the digital monitor, the sensor box turns each reading into a number and sends it as a code of on and off pulses. The display only has to tell whether each pulse is on or off, then turns the code back into the number. Ms. Sandoval-Reid explained that if the digital pulses ever got too weak or too noisy to read, the display would show "no signal" instead of a number. Both sensor boxes run on the same kind of battery, and batteries usually give less power when they get very cold.

3To check both monitors, Rafferty also hung an ordinary liquid thermometer in the tent and read it every two hours. He hung it right next to both sensor boxes, away from the sleeping bags, so that all three would measure the same air. Table 1 shows the night's log. The camp rule says that if the cabin display reads −10 °C or colder, the leader must wake the campers and hand out extra sleeping pads.

4At 6:30 a.m., the cabin's gas generator started up for breakfast, about 20 m from the tents. Electric equipment like a generator can send out radio noise. Maëlle read both displays once a minute for five minutes while the liquid thermometer stayed at −8 °C. Table 2 shows her readings. The digital display also saves every reading on a memory card. After breakfast, the club copied the file to three phones, and all three copies showed the same numbers as the card.