Twenty-five students from Lawrence Intermediate School joined thousands of students around the world in an Arctic expedition onto the frontlines of climate change to investigate ocean acidification in one of the most vulnerable and fragile environments on the planet.
Expedition and education specialists, Digital Explorer and Arctic Live sponsor Catlin Group Limited invited schools to interact live, via Skype in the classroom, with an expedition at the Natural Environment Research Council base on Svalbard, the northernmost public settlement in the world.
Linking up live with Digital Explorer’s Jamie Buchanan-Dunlop and Helen Findlay of the Plymouth Marine Laboratory, students were able to meet scientists and explorers on the expedition. They could see for themselves the vast, white Arctic environment and got the chance to ask the team anything from ‘What’s the most common animal they see?’ to questions about the experiments they were conducting.
LIS fifth grader teacher Daniel Brennan said Arctic Live felt like a once in a lifetime opportunity for his students.
“The ability to conduct research on the Arctic ecosystem and climate change and to generate questions to ask an actual scientist conducting the research is amazing.,” Brennan said in a statement.
Brennan’s class is putting together a presentation about the experience to share with the rest of the school.
More than 3,000 students between the ages of seven and 16 took part in Arctic Live through Skype in classroom whilst thousands more young people were able to follow the expedition to the Arctic via the Digital Explorer blog, social media and the accompanying educational resources.
More information is online at digitalexplorer.com.
