High Seas High Schoolers: Creating ERESE Content on an Expedition to Samoa

As part of the ERESE program, three high school seniors aboard the ALIA expedition generated contents and published a live trip website with a wide range of information about the science and personal aspects of the cruise. These activities served to relate as much meaningful information about the month-long research cruise in the South Pacific as possible, to people of all ages and skills. The website http://earthref.org/ERESE/projects/ALIA/ has reports on almost every aspect of the research cruise; from what it is like staying on the Research Vessel Kilo Moana for a month, to operating machinery, to interviews with the captain and chief scientists, and even how the equipment aboard works, in less than technical terms. An effective way to relay what was actually going on aboard the Kilo Moana, were the daily reports, written by the high school students, complete with the pictures and videos taken that day. This website connected the ALIA cruise to high school students and classrooms, who were following the expedition through the website both in the United States and in Samoa. High school seniors designed and implemented the "CruiseWatch" feature on the Alia website. This "applet" extracts data from the shipboard datastream and relays them to the ERESE website at the San Diego Supercomputing center via satellite, where they are prepared for real-time display on the cruise website. Data displayed include the ships' location on the map, geographic coordinates, heading, speed and wind speed. During dredging operations it displays the length of wire deployed, wire speed and wire tension. Overall the website with the daily reports and photographs, in addition to other web media, gave this trip a unique ability to engage people from around the world in researching oceanographic and geological phenomena.