High school students send off weather balloon to land near Dresden

DRESDEN, Tenn. — Some of the top high school students from Kentucky made their way to northwest Tennessee Tuesday for a special project — a weather balloon traveling from Murray to Dresden.

But that’s not all the students have found while tracking this project through the skies.

For the past four weeks, 18 students participating in the Kentucky Governor’s Scholar’s Program at Murray State University have been working on the high-altitude balloon.

“The way the weather balloon works is when it gets high enough the pressure in the balloon will get too high, and so it will pop and then fall down, and we built a contraption where the parachute will catch it as it comes down,” scholar student Mary Hardy said.

More than 350 students participate in different classes for the program, a five-week educational experience that allows the students to learn without normal pressures.

“It’s really about learning and finding the joy of learning and how you can enjoy it and become a better person by learning through others,” student Cameron Fontes said. “And that’s really been the best part — to expand yourself as a person with other people.”

During the experiment, the class experienced some technical difficulties with the tracking device, causing them to lose signal and not see it land. However, students are grateful for all the extra lessons learned throughout the project.

“We had a lot of little tasks and a lot of people, so it was kind of working out like, ‘how can I be a leader in this situation, how can other people be a leader, how can we figure out to get into separate groups and work with each other and actually get something done,’ because we had limited time,” Hardy said.

The class is asking if anyone sees or finds their balloon to contact local law enforcement or their teacher at joshuajwoodward@gmail.com.