Creativity and critical thinking : Students build ROVs on Catalina Island
By Lisa Catterall
Mount Madonna School ( MMS ) began a remotely operated vehicle ( ROV ) program for its tenth grade oceanography class a decade ago in collaboration with the University of Southern California ( USC ) Dornsife Wrigley Marine Science Center on Catalina Island .
The Wrigley Center is a research extension of USC , and was one of the first lab facilities in the world to provide not only seawater circulation directly through all laboratories , but to maintain an intact natural kelp forest ecosystem on site . For a time , this organization hosted MMS students and faculty and co-created the oceanography curriculum that is currently in use for the MMS Catalina learning journey .
MMS ’ s high school science staff accompanies students to Catalina island . This year , the school hired a boat to embed the competition day directly above the kelp forest . Students and teachers were picked-up at camp and traveled to the isthmus of the island with their completed ROVs .
The boat was anchored in clear shallow waters adjacent to a thick patch of kelp forest , and the students were told a story of an ancient civilization whose worship of sea creatures left priceless artifacts strewn throughout the ocean . One artifact , they were told , was suspected to be in the area of the boat .
As the program evolved through the pandemic , MMS committed to keeping the science curriculum intact by investing in all the equipment needed to deliver 10 handson field science and laboratory activities that used to involve borrowing USC ’ s equipment . One of the jewels of this program is the ROV competition .
Students assembled into two teams , and each team was asked to make a plan and find the artifact as quickly as possible . This fun activity added another dimension of critical thinking in that students had to think through and create a systematic way of searching the area on the seafloor .
Teachers secretly dropped a cast-iron octopus from the side of the boat to the white sands below .
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