When the Congin School fifth graders entered the interactive learning room at the Gulf of Maine Research Institute in Portland, the first thing they saw was a cylindrical fish tank with a school of small, silvery fish schooling around.
This would be the only low-tech thing they’d lay their eyes on over the next two and half hours. The rest would be 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 GMRI 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.
The program, which launched officially in January, combines high-tech presentation with realistic scientific research activities in the LabVenture! interactive educational program. The GMRI will offer a new program every year in the learning center at its newly constructed research facility in Portland.
The GMRI plans to give every middle school student in Maine an opportunity to take part in the program. The institute pays for bussing and putting on the program through its own funding.
Alan Lishman, chief innovation officer for GMRI, 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 GMRI. 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 GMRI spokesman Ben Slayton. “They might not all become marine scientists, but some of them might.”
THE ROOM
The kids enter the room, which looks like a small movie theater with dark walls and low light and an approximately 40-foot ceiling. In the center of the room is a set of cathedral-seat bleachers in front of a large movie screen. Around the room are the four LabVenture! stations.
In the beginning, the kids watch a 20-minute video presentation on the Gulf of Maine and its relation to their school district. The presentation attempts to show them how the Gulf of Maine touches their lives.
After the video, the kids break up into four groups and go around the stations to perform hands-on research.
LEARNING AT THE STATIONS
Three of the stations are based on cognitive learning and one based on kinesthetic, or motion, learning. At each station, the kids have 20 minutes to develop and record their data. They’re helped through their work by the two educators in the room.
Their teachers from the middle school are there, but they’re not allowed to help, only observe. The kids are 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).
“We don’t have the facilities as a school to offer this,” said Congin fifth-grade teacher Claire Lambert, who marveled at the presentation and her students’ enthusiasm. “The technology is phenomenal. I want to play.”
At the aquarium station, or kinesthetic station, the kids are asked to watch the motion of the rainbow smelts as they school in unison. An educator asks them to make observations about their motion. The kids then walk around the cylindrical aquarium in silence attempting to “school” without talking the way the fish do.
At the commercial fishing station, the teams use 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.
The kids learn how to read an echogram, or fish finder, and choose a vessel from a list of varying-sized and priced vessels actually operating in the Gulf of Maine. They plot a fishing course and drop their nets where they think they see fish on the echogram. The station tells them how much they made with each drop and keeps track of their money and gas.
SOLVING THE MYSTERY OF THE X-FISH
At the food station, the teams analyze what the fish eats to help discover its identity. Teams at four panels look at sample stomach contents of an X-Fish through a microscope, which they compare to potential food samples on the video screen. They also measure a frozen specimen of the X-Fish and make other observations in a step-by-step process, building evidence.
“It’s fun. It’s hands-on, different from the classroom,” said 11-year-old Mikaela Carey.
At the morphology station, the kids use their frozen specimen itself and photographic evidence to further build their case. The station prompts them to photograph the fish at different angles and identify and take close-up photographs of various parts of the fish’s anatomy. They use the pictures to identify the X-Fish from a list of possible suspects.
“It’s fun figuring out the puzzle,” said Team Zoea member Michael Montanese. “And it was kind of hard.”
At the end of the program, the kids get another video presentation on the big screen. The presentation is controlled from a booth high up in the back wall of the room. An educator walks them through all the clues, using footage from videos the teams made at the stations. All together, the group figures out the identity of the X-Fish.
EVERY KID GETS A CHANCE
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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