7/28/2013: Translating to High School

We were able to set four sets of traps and cameras today. While gear was soaking, Paul (the high school teacher) & I worked on a lesson plan to translate the work we do into something that high school student can easily understand and utilize. It will include a variety of different skills that are important to science as well as interesting to students. The lab we have designed will focus on using video data to count numbers of fish that appear on videos. Paul chose triggerfish & tomtate, which seemed highly appropriate based on the videos that we have collected on this trip. However, this lesson could easily be modified to count any species which is very commonly seen on a particular set of videos. Based on the videos I posted here, black seabass would be an excellent choice.

In our lab, the students will count numbers of two species of fish present on the videos each minute for twenty minutes. Once they have finished counting, the students can then find the average number of individuals on the video, graph the presence of fish over time, and even compare their data to the data of others in the class. Using the class data, they can discover the preferred habitat for each species. This can all be written into a laboratory report & “sent to the researchers.” I am pretty excited about this idea because I have been trying to come up with a way to incorporate video observations into an accessible lab. I think Paul has come up with a methodology which will be perfectly suited to the high school classroom. We have worked together to incorporate skills that are essential to students in the science classroom along with using real videos to create “data.”

I have an additional idea that I think would be a great lesson. That idea is having students plot the position of the ship each day. I would give them a list of positions for the trip & they would have to plot where the ship is located, find water depths, distances traveled and other parameters. I think this would be a great lesson for an Oceanography or Earth Science class. If I get to teach a research course, I will definitely incorporate some of these skills into the lessons that I design for that course. Ideally in that case, students would participate in their own research cruise for a few days. One of their projects would then be to go back and plot our position on a daily basis. The students would also complete their own oceanographic research projects, such as quantifying plankton, benthic worms, physical oceanographic profiles, and other parameters. I think that this would be an exceptionally enjoyable course to teach, and I think that the students would get a great deal of value out of completing their own research projects. I would have really loved to have that sort of experience during my high school career.