Frigid air and frozen oceans: Educational outreach opportunities in Arctic ocean-ice-atmosphere research
Abstract
Arctic research provides a marvelous venue for educational outreach activities. The polar regions, with snow and ice, months-long winter nights and summer days, and marine mammals such as seals, whales, and polar bears, has an intrinsic sense of adventure and interest. This interest provides an entry point for educational outreach activities, but does not guarantee success. Arctic researchers studying ocean-ice-atmosphere interactions have used a myriad of techniques for education outreach activities: web sites, classroom visits, lectures, news articles, and e-mail correspondence from the field. One such web site, http://arcss-oaii.hpl.umces.edu/outreach.htm, has been developed as a clearinghouse for researchers to share ideas, strategies, and techniques. For K-12 outreach, developing an ongoing effort with several classroom visits over the school year, is particularly effective. Classroom visits with brief lectures, replete with pictures, followed by an experiment or activity make it relatively straightforward to convey the enthusiasm and excitement of polar research. A more difficult task, however, is to integrate outreach activities into the curriculum. Collaborating with teachers is essential to achieve this integration. In public lectures, it is productive to first capture the audience's attention by describing what it is like to work in the polar regions, then discuss the science. It is important to distill the science to one or two key concepts and present them clearly and concisely. A recurring theme was that not only were outreach activities fun and satisfying, but they also enhanced the researchers understanding of the material.
- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2003
- Bibcode:
- 2003AGUFMED12C..06P
- Keywords:
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- 3349 Polar meteorology;
- 4540 Ice mechanics and air/sea/ice exchange processes;
- 6605 Education