Chapter 5 of Explore the Salish Sea
This unit is undergoing an update! Completion goal: 12-16-22.
Ocean Tech
SeaDoc Science Director, Joe Gaydos, takes a closer look at the Oceangate submarine.
What this unit is about…
The moon is more explored than the ocean, and that includes the Salish Sea. Where it is inconvenient or even impossible for people to go, we can engineer technology to go there for us, like the Mars Rovers, space probes, automatic unmanned vehicles, drones, and in this unit, remotely operated vehicles (ROV’s). Ocean Tech revisits the engineering process, but this time it requires physical, mechanical, and electrical engineers working together as a team to achieve a student-driven mission.
Chapter 5, Life in the Deep: The Subtidal World, is our first look into the amazing life forms that live their whole lives underwater. Is there access to the subtidal world near your school? If you can get to one (even if it is a pond or a pool), your students’ engineering efforts will find their reward. What mystery or problem will your students explore with their own ROV? Dive in!
Next Generation Science Standards in this unit:
4-PS3-4 Design an ROV that converts chemical potential energy to mechanical kinetic energy.
5-PS2-1 Describe with evidence all of the forces acting on the ROV.
3-5-ETS1-1 Define an ROV design problem and all of its constraints.
3-5-ETS1-3 Conduct tests to identify failure points and improve an ROV prototype.
MS-ETS1-1 Use science to design the most efficient ROV with respect to the health of people and the environment.
MS-ETS1-3 Analyze data to select the most effective ROV design to meet mission success criteria.
MS-PS2-2 Investigate to show that the change in the ROV’s motion depends on the sum of the forces acting upon it and its mass.
MS-ESS3-1 Apply scientific principles to design a method for monitoring and minimizing a human impact on the environment using the ROV.
The Sequence
After you have registered for the curriculum, preparing the unit is as easy as 1, 2, 3!
Review the unit plan, and customize it to suit your needs
This unit plan is flexible, adaptable, and in Word format to ensure that your experience can be tailored geographically to your local watershed and community, and to your particular teaching objectives and needs. Use the plan like a map- it has directions, resources, learning targets and performance expectations, and more to guide every step of the way, but the adventure you and your students share is your own. Revise as you see fit!
Review and customize the slideshow
This slideshow presents helpful background information, including links to online resources and videos. With helpful presenter notes, it also acts as a guide as you progress. As with the unit plan, you may want to customize certain slides to make them even more relevant and local. For this reason, it is in PowerPoint. Save a copy and make the change you see fit.
Review, customize, and print the accompanying student journal
This editable Word document is your students’ place to wonder, record observations, take notes, diagram, and plan and record scientific investigations or engineering processes. It is also a place to celebrate hard work with well-deserved stamps on the back page. Review and customize the journal to reflect the changes you’ve made in your unit plan and slideshow.
HOW TO PRINT
In Microsoft Word, click on the Layout menu, then the arrow to expand the Page Set Up options. Click Margins and select “Book Fold” in the drop down menu by Multiple pages. Print in landscape orientation on 8.5 x 14” (legal) paper with two staples along the center fold. Note: the font is Helvetica. Changing the font can change alignment of journal pages.
Utilize the materials below for additional student resources throughout the unit.
Additional Resources & Materials
Assessments
Every unit has its own pre- and post-assessments for tracking the progress and growth that students make throughout the curriculum. Links to these (and additional formative assessments!) are also provided in the unit plan.
OCEAN TECH POST-ASSESSMENT
OCEAN TECH PRE-ASSESSMENT
WONDER
Give your students a visual or sensory experience that provides a chance to wonder at a phenomenon in the ocean. The Unit Plan and Slideshow supply an unexpected encounter of a denizen of the deep by a NOAA ROV team, but you can incorporate an outdoor activity, an observational field trip, or an in-classroom presentation, video, or still photo to invoke curiosity about a phenomenon that students can’t wait to try to solve.
Essential question
After the experience of “wonder,” it is time to give the Ocean Tech Student Journal to each student. Here is a time to write thoughts, ideas, and questions into their journals inspired by their reading of Explore the Salish Sea Chapter 5, Life in the Deep: The Subtidal World. After students have read and written, invite an open discussion with the class. Develop an essential question around the mystery or problem they’d like to solve.
Background research
Once you have established an essential question, the information-gathering begins...or continues! The Explore the Salish Sea book is a great place to start, there are some additional resources in the link below, and you may find many more of your own. Of course, you’ll come back to this step throughout the process, as your questions and claims will require support.
Engineer it!
Imagine, design, build, test, fail, redesign, rebuild, retest…you get the idea. Repeat until there is a working ROV. Retrain students who are afraid to fail until they see that failure is an essential part of success!
Develop a Testable Question
This is when your students take that larger essential question and distill it down into specific, testable question that can be answered using their ROV.
put science to work
Identify variables, design a procedure, carry out an investigation, analyze data, and see where active discovery leads. Will there be answers? Solutions? More questions to test? It may even be back to the drawing board to start all over again. The scientific process is never linear (and it never ends), but there is always an adventure! Read through this UC Berkeley weblink for teaching Science, then print the scientific process chart for students or to post in your classroom. Find the resources to guide your students’ own scientific process in the Slideshow and Student Journal.
communicate your findings
This is a crucial part of the scientific process! It is the part where the results of all your hard work can make a difference. This may be a difference in the choices a few citizens make each day to help the sea or a new bill on the Senate floor that changes the way our whole state helps the whales. Click on the button above to return to the Real Process of Science website’s online tool for students to build the story of their scientific process.
Photo courtesy of Brandon Cole
Click the button below to go to the Box folder of all the documents for this unit in one place.
Ideas for improvement? Share ideas and resources with our Education Coordinator, Mira, at mdlutz@ucdavis.edu.