Candid Student Reports

The following (emails) were written by members of the TIP Tapper program during the second day of the first week. Some elements may have been removed for various reasons, but the text that remains is in the student's own words.

 
Today was hard, but not impossible like I thought it 
might be. Just for the record, I was NOT part of the 
mixing group like my partner Ben, so I did not cause 
Storm to crash. I was just in the room diligently 
doing my work, of course. Seriously, I thought some 
of the stuff we did today was pretty fun. I just 
can't wait for our two big projects coming up later.
from the mixing hieghts perspective... this was 
definatly an interesting problem.  After gaining 
adequate understanding of the required science, the 
operations became much easier.


 Harding & Ben
 

 
Today our objective was to present a way to improve 
the air quality in Lamar, Colorado.  The scenario 
involved a power plant that generated .15ppm of toxic 
ozone, when the federal regulations specified only 
.08ppm.  Using the OZIP program, we found out meteoro-
logical and emission data on the city to try and 
figure out how much to reduce the reactants of ozone 
within a budget of $1 million.  Everything would have 
worked fine, except...Storm crashed at the end of the 
day.  So now our project has been put on hold.


 Jason, Madhu and Matt
 

 
Today was even harder.  The most interesting thing was 
that Storm crashed.  Alexander and Russell were 
working on the interface while Kevin worked on the 
mixing heights.   But other than that today was very
amusing because none of us had a clue what we were 
doing.


 Russell, Alexander and Kevin
 

 
Today, Storm crashed.  So all the work we has done 
fore the project was totally useless.  At least by 
the end of the day we understood what was supposed to 
happen and so much more about the science and modeling 
than we did this morning.  I (renee) was on thre 
mixing height group (and no we did not crash storm. 
really)  by lunch time I was totally confused with 
all the numbers we had looked up, but then i finally 
got it.  I think the break helped.  THe other two of 
us looked up a lot of the rest of the information on 
the internet and made a spreadsheet of the project 
costs.  Then all three of us put our numbers together 
and filled out the OZIP interface, but when we tried 
to run it, the whole thing went totally poop.  Maybe 
Bob2 will have STorm fixed by tomorrow so we can see 
if our answers are right.


 Natalie, Renee and Bev
 

 
We started the day with lectures, which were kind of 
long, but we took breaks so it wasn't that bad. We 
got on the computers and it was relatively difficult, 
but interesting. Everything didn't always work 
perfectly, but Bob 2 was very helpful. Overall, I 
enjoyed today, and I think this program will be fun 
but challenging.


 Jason
 

 
This was a pretty "interesting day."  Storm crashed 
today just as we were sending in our reports to be 
processed.  Netscape also froze.  In spite of the 
frustration and confusion, we did learn quite a bit 
about computer modeling.
Tomorrow seems to be promising though.  There is less 
looking information up from the internet, and Bob2 
says that it will be less confusing


 Eric, Liz and Ryan