Lia Willis: “I love getting messy!”

Cambridge Middle School student Lia Willis has been swimming in her local stream her entire life, and two years ago she decided to do some hydrology experiments to explore what she swims in. With encouragement from local GLOBE teacher Gill McCready from Leamington School, Lia decided to do a GLOBE hydrology study for her Science and Technology Fair project.

With support from Environment Waikato, Lia produced an outstanding hydrology assessment that not only won first prize at the Waikato Science and Technology Fair, but it was also awarded two special prizes. What makes Lia’s achievement even more remarkable is that she has partial hearing loss due to having glue ear in her infancy, which has also resulted in speech, reading and academic delays overall. But this hasn’t stopped Lia, who is now a GLOBE mentor who supports other student’s with their environmental investigations.

Lia repeated her hydrology study this year to determine if there were any changes to the stream’s conditions. She found an increase in macroinvertebrates and improved water clarity, and concluded that the health of the stream has improved. Lia has since written a letter to the Cambridge Tree Trust to inform them of her findings.

The success of Lia’s hydrology Science and Technology Fair project has boosted her confidence and increased her self-esteem. The miracle of the GLOBE programme is that it has ignited Lia to reach towards her potential in all curriculum areas. Lia is now achieving at a higher academic level, and she has great aspirations of becoming an environmental scientist when she is older.

GLOBE teacher Gill McCready is passionate about the GLOBE programme and her enthusiasm for environmental science is both inspiring and infectious. She supports enthusiastic students from a number of local schools to take part in the programme.