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- The primary goal of this series is that middle-school students will find the general field of marine science more understandable and accessible, and will understand the diversity of scientific disciplines that make up this field.
- Students will learn about the real-life process of marine biology by following an actual week of life aboard a working research vessel.
- Some students believe that science is inaccessible, and that the process is not fun and exciting. Marine science is a field still making discoveries, and one that is readily understandable and accessible by middle school students. These lessons and videos seek to bring a human face to this field, while introducing the scientific concepts that make up the field.
- Five separate lessons are presented against the general background of a week at sea, dealing with themes of vessel buoyancy, the composition of seafloor sediments, how to find locations at sea, the diversity of animals in the ocean, and the food chain and ecology of the open ocean.
- Each of these five lessons (one for each day of the week of instruction) and has an accompanying video, which was filmed on-board during the cruise, and a hands-on lesson focusing on the day’s theme.
- Day 1: What Floats Your Boat: Introduction to Boats and Buoyancy.
- Day 2: Sampling the seafloor: Reading the messages in mud.
- Day 3: Sampling the water column: Finding your position at sea.
- Day 4: Animal diversity: So many fish in the sea!
- Day 5: The food chain: Who’s coming to dinner?
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- "Any floating object displaces its own weight of fluid." – Archimedes. This lesson introduces students to concepts of buoyancy, and how ships use this buoyancy to float and carry a load. They will do a hands-on exercise in buoyancy by loading and sinking small "boats" in desktop aquaria. They will record and compare the recorded weights of both “cargo” and the amount of water needed to sink the same boat in this exercise, in order to compare densities of different substances, and to illustrate how boats can bear loads that may be larger in volume, but must be less in mass than their displacement of water.
- Students will learn that the volume of water required to sink a small boat is approximately equal to the displacement of that boat when loaded.
- Students will be able to describe Archimedes' principle and how a boat floats in relation to its mass, volume and surface area.
- Students will be able to measure volume of a cargo, and from this and the mass of the cargo, measured above, will be able to calculate payload density and to compare the densities of different substances to the density of water.
- This lesson introduces students to some of the components of marine sediments and terrestrial soil, using basic sediment analysis methods and demonstrating how to extract some of the sediment constituents, and to recording and comparing real field data.
- Students will understand that earth sediments are composed of different materials and can include biogenic substances (those coming from plants and animals, such as shells).
- Students will understand how this composition of sediments differs for oceanic and terrestrial environments.
- Students will be able to measure and quantify some of these components of sediments.
- This lesson introduces students to concepts of the global geoid, the basic form of the world latitude and longitude grid, and how to express and find a location using this system. Students will also be introduced to calculations of distances between two locations.
- Students will understand that the globe is organized by two sets of lines, latitude and longitude.
- Students will understand that this system is the same for both land and ocean.
- Students will be able to describe a location using latitude and longitude anywhere on the surface of the earth.
- This lesson introduces students to the diversity of life in the oceans, using images of samples taken during an oceanographic cruise, and gives an introduction to the taxonomic system used to classify those organisms.
- Students will understand that there is tremendous diversity of life in the open ocean, and that organisms have evolved a number of specialized characteristics to deal with the low-light, high-pressure, low-temperature, food-poor regions of the deep oceans.
- Students will understand that this diversity has been organized by scientists into taxonomic groups, and will understand at least one of the most basic divisions in that organizational system – invertebrate vs. vertebrate.
- This lesson introduces students to the idea of trophic consumption levels in the oceans, and shows some examples of Southern California marine food chains.
- Students will understand that the variety of organisms in the ocean are all involved in trophic interactions with particular other species, and that this consumptive relationship is called the food web.
- Students will understand that primary production is a term that means plant life, which is converting sunlight into organic material, and that almost all life in the ocean has as a trophic base this primary production.
- Students will understand that there is energy and mass loss when going form one trophic level up to another.
- Students will know that there are five common trophic levels, and will be able to make guesses about which level an animal is in, and will be able to guess about some of the food items an animal might eat from it’s trophic level.
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Amphipod
Giant kelp
Great White Shark
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- Grade Level: 5-8
- Time Frame: 1 week
- Objective: To make the general field of marine science more understandable and accessible for this grade level, and to have students understand the diversity of scientific disciplines that make up this field.
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RV Melville
Scripps Pier
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Design EarthRef.org
Sponsored by NSF and NSDL
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