This is a question that we ask our students on the first day of school in September. Boy, we have some interesting things to share on our first day of school. This summer, we travelled together to the Pavilion Lake Research Project to learn about the science that is being done here and how it can be incorporated into the classroom. During the year Bree and I are both immersed in the classroom, and most of the time we are teaching science. Today we have found ourselves writing a blog which neither of us have done before. We seem to be entertaining the people around us with our different ideas of how best to compose one of these, and we will find out if we get a gold star later. The crew here have been very welcoming and happy to share about what they do here. In fact, our first night here we were allowed to get inside one of the DeepWorker submersibles which are used during the scientist flight missions (we were still on dry land, but still very cool). Part of us being here at Pavilion Lake was to integrate teachers into the different activities that go on here, and integrate us they did.
From left, Bree Riddell, Ricky Arnold and Jen Stonehouse
So we are sure you are wondering what we were were able to do at the lake. Unfortunately we were not allowed to drive the subs but we had many other cool opportunities to be part of the team. We sat in on science meetings, pilot meetings, classified data from the submersibles, talked to scientists and astronauts, observed the launches of the submersibles and helped record data from the flights as a science stenographer. One of things that we did was classify the images returned from the underwater flights. During the flights images of what the pilots see is recorded on camera. The pilots see very cool things when on their mission – microbialites. After the mission this data then has to be classified. We looked at images to identified what was in the image – microbialites, algae, rocks, sediment, trash – oh my! This is something that can easily be transferred to the classroom. We classify every day just like the scientists (just on a different level). As the team here classifies these images for science and further understanding, students can also classify these images in the process of learning how to do science. Trust us (or read the rest of these blogs if you don’t), microbialites are very interesting!
How did we do with our first blog? Did we get a gold star?
-Jen and Bree
