Learn from home
Whale hello there!
Are school closures keeping you at home? Why not bring a shark into your living room?
Learn from home with Ocean School!
We've combed through Ocean School to put together a few weeks of our favourite materials There's an educational video and a student activity for each week day.
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Schedule
Note: Students will need access to a tablet or computer with internet access.
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Week 1
Monday
Week 1Sharks are awesome
360° video | 3 minutes
Description: Sharks have survived in the ocean for millions of years - from the time of the dinosaurs! Let’s take a 360° view of sharks and the adaptations that make them so amazing. How can we help these awesome creatures face the challenges to come?
Activity | 30 minutes
Description: Students are invited to develop a superhero comic for sharks which demonstrates their amazing adaptations.
Tuesday
Week 1CSI: Cod Stock Investigation
Video | 4.5 minutes
Description: Holly dissects two cod, searching for a deeper understanding of the species. At a traditional fishing shack, Holly fillets a cod for eating. At the Marine Institute in St. John’s, Holly helps conduct a scientific “fish autopsy,” discovering secrets about the cod’s eggs, ears and more…
Activity | 20-40 minutes
Description: Students become detectives and create a case file which presents everything you can learn about a cod when you dissect it.
Wednesday
Week 1Anatomy of a cod
Interactive experience | 20 minutes
Description: Sharpen your virtual knives! During this interactive experience, students will dissect a cod, discovering its deeper anatomy and the secrets of its health.
Activity | 120 minutes
Description: Data analysis: Students are given a data set from a cod dissection and are led through a variety of data analysis tasks which explore the relationship between a fish’s health, reproduction and sustainability.
Thursday
Week 1Put the quest in questions
Video | 2 minutes
Description: How can you ask the most powerful questions, in order to unlock an even wider universe of knowledge? And why is the choosing of a simple word (like "How" or "Why") the key to your greatest quest and your greatest question?
Activity | 60-120 minutes
Description: Students are invited to generate questions inspired by videos. After, they categorize the types of questions they’ve posed, and discuss what qualities distinguish questions that promote further inquiry.
Friday
Week 1How to build a submarine
Video | 3 minutes
Description: How do we explore the deep open ocean? With a submarine! Join Sergio and Boris for a tour of the Deepsee submarine from sub pilot Shmulik Bloom. He explains how the parts of the submarine allow us to move, film, and breathe under the sea!
Activity | 30 minutes
Description: Students are invited to imagine their own robo-sub using provided parts, and label their diagrams with the types of technology their submersible would use to gather data on habitats and species.
Bonus!
Week 1
Where's Whaledo
App | 10 minutes
Description: You’ve never watched a whale this closely! Invite a virtual Right Whale into your room, built to an amazing scale… Reach out and discover every detail of this mighty mammal, all the way from its blowhole to its flukes!
Activity | 120 minutes
Description: Make a whale to scale! Students are challenged to create a 2D whale in their gym or classroom using recycled materials.
Week 2
Monday
Week 2All around the oyster farm
360° video | 1.5 minutes
Description: Malpeque Bay is home to one of the tastiest oysters in the world! Explore an oyster farm here — from point-of-harvest to conveyor belt — in 360° panorama!
Activity | 10 minutes
Description: Career reflection! Students are asked to reflect on being an oyster farmer. They are challenged to think about how future changes to the ocean and climate could impact this career.
Tuesday
Week 2Ulva overload
Video | 5 minutes
Description: Human activity can have an effect on marine ecosystems, in cascading ways. What is the correlation between the farming of a PEI potato and the overabundance of ulva (sea lettuce) in Malpeque Bay? Further, how might the ulva be choking out the bay’s eelgrass: a habitat critical for so many species? Ultimately, it’s all a matter of balance.
Activity | 30 minutes
Description: Drama and storyboarding: Students are invited to get creative and write a dialogue between the ulva and the eelgrass that summarizes how humans affect each species and how they affect each other.
Wednesday
Week 2Bay watch
Interactive experience | 30 minutes
Description: During this interactive experience, students will explore how changes to certain variables impact the health of eelgrass in Malpeque Bay, and therefore the survival of other species in the habitat. Students will use the data they collect during the experience to create data visualizations, then share their work with friends and classmates.
Activity | 120 minutes
Description: Students are given the data they have collected during the interactive and are led through a variety of data analysis tasks which explore the relationships between nutrients and other variables in the environment.
Thursday
Week 2Grocery shopping for whales
Video | 4 minutes
Description: Anisha sets sail with Andrew, in order to get to the bottom of the Bay of Fundy’s food chain. Anisha discovers three quick links which make up this chain: from foundational phytoplankton, to tiny crustacean copepods, to mighty whales. Every creature must eat to survive, and their underwater food chain is what binds the ocean together.
Activity | 30 minutes
Description: Food chain challenge! Students are asked to imagine what food they would eat if had to eat the same thing everyday. They are then challenged to create a food chain from source to table for that food and compare the food chain with that of a right whale.
Friday
Week 2Netukulimk
Video | 2 minutes
Description: This animation is a history of cod, as inspired by Mi’kmaw storytelling tradition. Little Fish inherits the history of her species from the tales of her Grandmother: from creation, through thousands of years of “Netukulimk” (harmony with nature), to modern industrial devastation. As Little Fish becomes a Grandmother herself, she continues this oral tradition with a renewed hope for the future… and for the return of “Netukulimk”.
Activity | 60-120 minutes
Description: Students are invited to create a fort and/or survival plan of what they would need to survive. They can only take from the earth and land and must consider factors like season, weather and local habitat and ecosystem.
Bonus!
Week 2
Fly ROPOS
App | 30 minutes
Description: Take the plunge! Students pilot the ROPOS in their very own underwater adventure. Working together as a team, student groups will fly the ROPOS through a virtual environment, gathering deep-sea samples and data along the way. Explore further! Gather more!
Activity | 120 minutes
Description: Data analysis! Students document their species identification data from the ROPOS activity, and create graphs to learn about the relationships between species and their habitats.
Week 3
Monday
Week 3To the continental shelf ...
Video | 4.5 minutes
Description: In the immense vastness of the Pacific Ocean, a small island off the coast of Costa Rica provides a safe haven for marine species who make grueling migrations through this gigantic ecosystem. Cocos Island is an extinct volcano where life has flourished and provided a sanctuary for species such as sharks, turtles, and dolphins. It’s like an open sea laboratory and the perfect place for Sergio and Boris to study the migratory habits of the animals that come to this otherwise uninhabited island.
and beyond!
Activity | 20 minutes
Description: Describing scale and distance! We know the Pacific Ocean is big, but just how big is it? Students use numeric data to get a feel for the areas, distances, and depths described in our adventure to Cocos Island.
Tuesday
Week 3On the island
360° video | 3 minutes
Description: Migrations across the ocean are often grueling journeys that can last for weeks or even months. These treks require large stores of energy that many species get from feeding at places like Cocos Island. Observe how valuable nutrients from the land nourish a wide range of animals in the ocean.
Activity | 75 minutes
Description: Create a VR tour! Students are given a series of 360° photos to build their own VR tour. They are prompted to add their learning into the tour via information points or narration.
Wednesday
Week 3Seamount science
Video | 4.5 minutes
Description: Studying a place like the open ocean is not easy. For one, it’s deep. Really deep. And that makes getting there extremely difficult. But Sergio and Boris need to reposition a lost acoustic receiver at the seamount of Las Gemelas. But it’s down much further than they could ever go in scuba gear. Time to launch the submarine. The DeepSee submersible is designed to take Sergio and Boris deeper than they’ve ever been before.
Activity | 20 minutes
Description: Caption it! Students take a screenshot from the video that illustrates an interesting moment, then explain why they found it interesting.
Thursday
Week 3Secret life of sharks
Video | 6 minutes
Description: Sergio and Boris are preparing to enter the shark-filled waters of Cocos Island as Alex Hearn and Randall explain the different tagging systems and how they work. As the team goes over the final preparations before the dive, Alex demonstrates how to physically tag the sharks when close.
Activity | 30 minutes
Description: Choose your tagging strategy! Students use information about the strengths, weaknesses, and costs of different tagging technologies to decide which ones they would use to study the scalloped hammerhead.
Friday
Week 3Powerful observations
360° video | 10 minutes
Description: Choose your own adventure on Cocos Island. This 360 video allows you to use your powers of observation and seek out things that lead to all new environments. Will it be in the sky? Or on the land? Or even below the water. You get to explore by activating your learning skills and making powerful observations.
Activity | 60-120 minutes
Description: Field observation! Students are invited to activate their observation skills in this interactive 360 experience. They visit the rainforest and the waters of Cocos island and are challenged to deeply observe and describe 2 environments. Following the 360 experience, they prepare their own field journals.
Bonus!
Week 3Dive detectives is a new VR experience!
Dive detectives
Interactive experience | 30 minutes
Description: Take the plunge! Dive in the waters around Cocos Island in the rainy and dry seasons to observe the wildlife. What are they doing here? Collaborate in a virtual scavenger hunt to discover information about different species who frequent Cocos Island and why the seamount habitat matters to them.
Activity | 120 minutes
Description: Conservation vision! Students use the evidence they collect in the VR experience to craft an argument about why Cocos Island needs protection. They develop a persuasive creative product to promote their vision for the future of Cocos Island.
Marine Migration
This week's materials feature content from the new Marine Migration module! Learn more 