中文

NYGH and Menlo Physics Collaboration

They may be thousands of miles apart but the teachers and students of Nanyang Girls’ High School, Singapore and Menlo School, California certainly don’t mind the gap. Not when it comes to physics at least.

Indeed, collaborating with partners on the other side of the world has proved an advantage for a special project group, comprising two girls from Menlo and three girls from Nanyang Girls’ High School. Sharing ideas via video calls, email and shared Google documents, these innovative students have been taking part in a project to determine the diameter of the Earth.

‘We were intrigued by the prospect of communicating with foreign similar-aged students to discover innovative ways to perform the calculations,’ says NYGH student Seow Ling Ern.

Inspired by ancient Greek scholar Eratosthenes’ work, the students have been able to use their differences in location to measure shadow lengths and hence determine a value for the diameter of the Earth.

‘This opportunity involving overseas collaboration to find the Earth’s girth is extremely rare and unique. We believe that it will help to widen our scope of thinking and develop us as all- rounded researchers in the process of unearthing the core of our experiment,’ adds Gu Tian Yi.

We look forward to many more such collaborations between the two schools.

让科学绽放光芒

天涯咫尺，三名新加坡南洋女子中学校女生与两名美国加利福尼亚州门罗中学的女生共同进行了一项“测量地球直径”的研究项目。她们通过电邮、视频等方式通话讨论。

根据公元前三世纪希腊天文学家、数学和地理学家，埃拉托色尼的理论，她们从不同的位置测量影子的长度，从而推断地球的直径。南中学生受访时表示，这项意义深长的计划让她们与同龄外国学生进行深度交流、研究，大大拓展她们的知识面。