Charles Lindgren

Scituate Public Schools


 

Before retiring, Charles Lindgren had been a science teacher in Scituate, Massachusetts for the past 42 years. He taught at the middle school level for 41 years, and last year became the K-12 Science Coordinator for the district. His retirement will take effect in September of 2009. During the course of his career he has attempted many innovative projects, most of which took his students beyond the walls of the classroom. In his award winning Weathergate Project, his students were paired with students in partner schools around the country in a year-long study of daily weather activity. Students interpreted weather data from spreadsheets. Then they created line, circle and bar graphs using the spreadsheets, and published the information to a website. For the past several years he hosted an activity where students in schools from above the Arctic Circle to the Equator measured the angle of the Sun on a monthly basis and posted the results for all to use. In collaboration with Arizona State University, his students used the Mars Odyssey spacecraft to photograph the surface of Mars. Students had to work in cooperative teams to create scientific proposals to submit to ASU. Before submitting the proposals they went through a peer review process. A scientist from Harvard viewed the peer review procedure and stated that it was identical to what actually happens in a true scientific setting. She was so impressed with the project that she suggested that it be presented at a scientific conference. Mr. Lindgren and the director of the ASU project, did a poster presentation at the American Geophysical Union's fall convention describing the procedure. The highlight of the activity was having one of the student images featured in an issue of the journal "Astronomy." Over the past three years Charles has also hosted the "Pringles Challenge," where students in a school are challenged to send a single potato chip to a partner school located at least 500 miles away, and have it arrived intact in the smallest, lightest package possible using the U.S. mail. Last year more than 100 schools, and more than 4,000 students participated in the Challenge.

At the current time Mr. Lindgren is associated with the Johnson Space Center helping them to design and beta test lessons for a project where students can write proposals to have astronauts on the International Space Station take digital images of targets to help them answer their questions.

Charles received both his bachelor's and master's degrees in Science Education from the University of Massachusetts at Boston. In addition, he has done advanced graduate work at Boston College in Curriculum and Instruction, and Montana State University.