The Sunnyvale Sun
Education
Yahoo! Answers the call to repair outdoor science lab
By Erin Hussey
In 1963, students, faculty and community members dug up a portion of the Fremont High School parking lot in Sunnyvale to create an outdoor science lab.
Despite attempts to maintain the lab, various budget cuts and lack of regular upkeep caused the lab to founder. Overgrown weeds outnumbered the native California plants. Garden planters turned bare, and the 8-foot pond, once filled with fish, turned to silt.
Today, with the support of Yahoo! and more than 100 helping hands, the Fremont science lab is starting to look more like its old self again.
"Leonardo DiCaprio posed the question on Yahoo! Answers yesterday about what kinds of things you can implement in your home or office to make an impact on global warming," said Nicki Dugan, senior director for corporate communications at Yahoo!
Yahoo! Answers, which is similar to a community forum, allows users both to post and answer questions. "We already do a pretty good job in our office environment, so we starting thinking about other ways we could help. We decided to look for a high school that was near our headquarters, and Fremont was a natural fit."
In addition to providing more than 50 volunteers with garden gloves, wader boots and shovels, Yahoo! donated $50,000 to help make Fremont "green." The money not only helps restore the science lab with a new greenhouse, pond and desert planter bed, it will also pay for new energy-efficient windows in the school's historic art building.
"It's allowed us to do thing we haven't even dreamt about," said Laurie Turner, Fremont High science department chair. "Well, we might have dreamt about it, but we never really thought it would happen. The lab is really going to be usable now, more than it ever has been."
Turner, who has taught at Fremont for 17 years, is excited to reintroduce the outdoor lab to the science curriculum on a more full-time basis, especially to the newly added environmental science course.
"We are going to be getting a weather station put in, which we'll feed into the school website and three webcams, which will let us monitor what is happening at any time," Turner said.
The science lab will also be used by some of the special education classes at Fremont. One planter bed will be dedicated to growing herbs and vegetables to be used in their cooking classes.
In conjunction with the "green" project day, Yahoo! Answers observed its first-year anniversary. To celebrate, the company flew out the top 25 Yahoo! Answers answerers from across North America for an awards ceremony and the opportunity to volunteer during the Fremont project.
"My wife actually found the site," said Gordon Glazner, from Winnipeg, Canada. "I went on the science and technology site and found a bunch of medical and biological questions that were not being answered because they were too high a level for the average person to know." Glazner, who is a medical professor at Winnipeg University and a research scientist in neurological diseases at St. Boniface Hospital, was soon one of the top answer providers in the category.
In the beginning he wasn't sure if he wanted his colleagues to know about his top rank on Yahoo! Answers, but it soon made its way around. "My department chair called me up and said, 'This is wonderful; you're a medical professor and teaching anyone, anywhere is part of your job,' " Glazner said, while wheeling in load of gravel. "So it turned out to be part of my work."
With the help of volunteers, within two hours the new science lab looked more like a lab and less like an overgrown, deserted garden.
"There aren't very many schools that have something like this," said Turner, referring to the lab. "To see that the community cares about their school is really important. To hear people say, 'Hey this is valuable,' it makes the students think it is valuable, too."
For more information on Yahoo! Answers or to post your own answer to DiCaprio's question, visit http://answers.yahoo.com.
