When the two Congin School fifth-grade classes entered the interactive learning room at the Gulf of Maine Research Institute in Portland, the first thing Mikaela Carey and her schoolmates saw was a cylindrical fish tank with a school of small, silvery fish swimming around.
This was the only low-tech thing they saw over the next two and half hours. The rest was plasma display screens, interactive digital touch screens and high-tech research tools.
With its “Mystery of the X-Fish” program and other programs to come, the Gulf of Maine Research Institute on Commercial Street is looking to be the center of marine learning for Maine’s fifth- and sixth-graders for the foreseeable future. It’s also looking to improve upon traditional museums where kids aren’t challenged to actively participate. In this program, the kids are actively involved, doing the same kind of hands-on research marine scientists do at the institute every day.
“This is very fun. It’s fun examining things,” said Carey. “At school science is…eh. It’s okay. It’s more fun learning in this environment.”
The program, which started in January, combines high-tech presentations with realistic scientific research activities in the LabVenture! interactive educational program. The institute will offer a new program every year in the learning center at its newly constructed research facility in Portland.
The institute plans to give every middle school student in Maine an opportunity to take part in the program. The research institute will pay the cost of bussing and putting on the program.
Alan Lishman, chief innovation officer for the institute, said kids are excited about math and science when they’re younger, but “we lose them in middle school.” He said the answer is to provide a program such as this in which they develop the data themselves, which “gets them really involved.”
The program provides a learning experience that mimics the work done by researchers at the institute. It gives them a realistic look at collecting scientific evidence, forming hypotheses, and drawing conclusions. And they seem to really like it.
“I think it’s cool that people actually stay here all day and analyze fish and water and how everything goes together,” said Congin fifth-grader Conner Richardson.
“Ultimately, what we want to do with the program is let kids do real science” in a way they can’t do at school, said Ben Slayton, a spokesman for the institute. “They might not all become marine scientists, but some of them might.”
Phenomenal technology
When they arrived, Richardson, Carey and their classmates entered a room that looks like a small movie theater with dark walls and low light and an approximately 40-foot ceiling. In the center of the room was a set of cathedral-seat bleachers in front of a large movie screen. Around the room were the four LabVenture! stations.
The first thing she and her classmates did was watch a 20-minute video presentation showing them how the Gulf of Maine affects their lives, even if they didn’t realize it. The presentation discussed how the Gulf touches Westbrook through the economy, job market and the environment.
After the video, the two classes broke up into four groups and started their hands-on research at the four stations around the room – to solve the Mystery of the X-Fish.
Three of the stations are based on cognitive learning and one based on kinesthetic, or motion, learning. At each station, the kids spent 20 minutes developing and recording data. They were helped through their work by the two educators in the room.
Their teachers, Liz Barker and Claire Lambert, were present in the room, but they weren’t allowed to help, only observe. The kids were divided up into teams of three or four with names like Team Lobster, Team Blue Fin, Team Zoea (a baby crab) and Team Diatom (algae).
At the aquarium station, or kinesthetic station, the kids were asked to watch the motion of the rainbow smelts as they swam in unison. They watched and made observations about the school’s motion. Then they were asked to walk around the cylindrical aquarium in silence attempting to “school” without talking the way the fish do.
At the commercial fishing station, the kids used the three digital interactive stations to learn what it’s like to fish for a living. Borrowing from video gaming, the station acts similar to a car racing game where a player tracks his or her race winnings.
“Video games are set up like this,” said Richardson, a member of Team Zoea.
Each team first learned how to read an echogram, or fish finder, and then chose a vessel from a list of varying-sized and priced vessels actually operating in the Gulf of Maine. Sara Schildroth and her teammates Kayln Tibbatts and Tori Winton chose a smaller vessel that wouldn’t hold as much catch but was less expensive than some of the bigger ships to enable them to make a longer trip.
They plotted a course and dropped their nets when they saw a big enough cloud of what could be fish on the fish finder. They received advice about conditions from videos of actual fishermen and constant information on how much money they made with each drop and how much gas they had left. They made a couple of profitable drops, a couple of unprofitable ones, and then they had to return to port.
“We don’t have the facilities as a school to offer this,” said Lambert, who marveled at the presentation and her students’ enthusiasm. “The technology is phenomenal. I want to play.”
The mystery of the X-fish
At the food station, Schildroth’s team analyzed what the fish eats to help discover its identity. Along with three other teams working on different sides of the station simultaneously, they looked at sample stomach contents of an X-Fish through a microscope, which they compared to potential food samples on the video screen. They also measured a frozen specimen of the X-Fish and made other observations in a step-by-step process, building evidence.
“It’s like a mystery. We don’t really know about it, so we’re learning,” said Schildroth, after she and her team had made their guess at what the X-Fish was. “I feel like we’re learning more than at school, getting to see what it’s like to be a marine scientist.”
At the morphology station, Michael Montanese and Conner Richardson of Team Zoea used their frozen specimen and photographic evidence to further build their case. The station prompted them to photograph the fish at different angles and identify and take close-up photographs of various parts of the fish’s anatomy. They used the pictures to identify the X-Fish from a list of possible suspects.
“It’s fun figuring out the puzzle,” said Montanese. “And it was kind of hard.”
At the end of the program, all of the kids gathered in the bleachers and watched another video presentation on the big screen. The presentation was controlled from a booth high up in the back wall of the room. An educator walked them through all the clues, using footage from videos the teams made at the stations. All together, the two classes figured out the identity of the X-Fish.
Every school district in Maine will get a chance to send middle school kids to take part in the program.
This year, the institute is planning to accommodate about half of all fifth- and sixth-graders in the state by running programs for about 50 kids each three days a week. Next year, it’ll try to get 75 percent by running programs four days per week. The year after that, it’ll be shooting for 100 percent of the state’s 15,000 fifth- and 15,000 sixth-graders by running four and a half days per week.
Lishman said the institute will be developing the program for next school year over the summer, another mystery for Maine’s middle school students to solve.
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