Ariel Simons

“TIGER Project”, Simons’ winning innovative program, is a community environmental monitoring and documentation project. TIGER stands for Technologically Integrated Geotagged Environmental Research. The TIGER project has four themes: air and water quality, drawing meaningful conclusions from data, social impact of environmental quality, and the economic motivators behind current and potential environmental conditions. Nearly 200 students at Wildwood School will be trained as citizen scientists by going to various sites in the south Los Angeles area and test various metrics such as pH and dissolved oxygen content of local outdoor water quality. As the project expands, he hopes to have the students study other measurements of local environmental quality, such as carbon dioxide and ultraviolet light intensity. They will then use netbooks, digital camcorders, and wiki software purchased with ING grant funds, to provide a cost-effective method for documenting their research and enabling real-time communication between the students and the instructor. Simons lives in Los Angeles.