On the flight back home, I spent some time trying to come up with ways to involve my students in the Antarctic experience. I hoped to figure out a way to make it OUR Antarctic experience. The rest of the time was spent trying to figure out lunch. As a chemistry teacher, I have tried many different ways to get young people involved and interested in learning. While not everything works, I still struggle with quantum mechanics, I have found some common techniques.
People are more interested and involved in a project if they have personal investment or interest.
While this seems to be common sense, think of the money that was spent on my college education to discover this. My father does. One of my solutions for involving students in the Antarctica experience was to have them design an experiment that I would take with me. Working with the physics teacher, Carl Mehrbach, we decided to have his students design experiments around the topic of heat transfer. The students were presented a problem, they designed an experiment to answer this question and spent two days working out the procedure and equipment needed.