We are grateful to the Antarctica folks for generously volunteering their time to support this service.

The sections below will describe some guidelines and procedures for the process.

K-12 students and teachers can email questions to researchers, scientists, and support staff. This interaction will be supported by a "Smart Filter" which protects the professional from Internet overload by acting as a buffer. The actual email addresses of these experts will remain unlisted. Also, repetitive questions will be answered from an accumulating database of replies; thus the valued interaction with the experts will be saved for original questions. (More information about how you can directly search this database will follow later).

We recognize that this creates a gray area about whether or not a question is appropriate. Simply use your best judgment. Since the main idea is to excite students about the wonders of science and research, please err on the side of having the students participate. If you are not sure whether or not to send a question, send it.

Some teachers have used a group dynamic to refine the questions that they email to experts. For example, after first studying LFA 2 material, students divide into groups and create a few questions per group. All of the questions are then shared, and students are given an opportunity to find answers to their classmates' questions. Those that remain unanswered are sent to the LFA 2 team.

Ideally, the act of sending questions will further engage the student in their learning. It may help to think back to an early stage of development when the 3-year-old learns that repeating the word "why" can get parents to do most of the work in a conversation The wise parent will try to get child involvement by asking "Why do you want to know?" The same is true in the classroom. Teachers might want to help students to learn to ask good questions. Here are three questions the students might ask themselves as they submit their questions:

What do I want to know?

Is this information to be found in a resource I could easily check (such as a school encyclopedia)?

Why do I want to know it? (What will I do with the information? or How will I use what I learn?)

question-lfa@quest.arc.nasa.gov.

We will acknowledge and answer all questions as quickly as possible. Our goal is to provide a basic acknowledgment immediately. In most cases we should be able to provide an answer within one week to ten days.

In the subject field, please put the letters "QA:" before a descriptive subject. Also, provide a sentence of background information to help the experts understand the grade level of your students. The following example should illustrate this idea.

TO:             question-lfa@quest.arc.nasa.gov

FROM:           your email address

SUBJECT:        QA: Krill feeding on algae

Hello,

I am an 8th grader from West Salem, Wisconsin.. In the "Oceans, Life

and Ice" broadcast we learned about Robin Ross and her krill studies. 

What factors influence the algae population in and around Antarctica?


Thanks, Laura Johnson

You can click here to review archived questions and answers from Live from Antarctica 1. Take a look at what was asked in the past to help you formulate questions for this round of Researcher Q & A!

| From The Field | Video Information | Researcher Q & A |
| Activities | Student Work | Discussion |
| Teacher's Guide | Search LFA2 | Related Materials |
| Teacher Home | Student Home | Parents and General Public Home |