Whirlwind of a School Year!

Be careful of what you wish for. It just might come true. Well I wished, and now my education dreams are coming true! It started way back in September when I found out that Mrs. Kushin was going to be teaching middle school science at St. Paul School in the Pribilof Islands. Yay! That meant we could continue our study and even work on Sea Perch together!

PolarTREC, NOAA Teacher-at-Sea, and COSEE Alaska all worked together to bring a group of wonderful teachers and scientists to Anchorage Alaska in early October. I was able to make new friends and add new collaborators to our project One Ocean On Earth.
click here to read about Mrs. P's X'Cellent Alaskan Adventure.

When I returned to Maui, I had two weeks to get a field trip hopping. I just had to get the students out to Waihe'e and sampling so that our new (and establish old friends) could understand our protocols, and work towards getting a first water sample online and shared with all of us. We had a great time at Waihe'e, collected our data and I emailed all the schools and teachers. It was now mid November, and the ocean was about to freeze over up north. Could I get another FT in before Christmas and test the Sea Perch for ocean worthiness?

Ya HUH! Field trip two was very successful in that we saw the Sea Perch go belly up and sideways due to the waves. It is a swimming pool kinda thang, my students needed to adapt it to the high sea! So back home and more thinking. I was still concerned about getting a platform to share information. There were no servers or ways to upload info in an efficient way, my tail was dragging. At least the Perch had a water sampler attached now, although the water sampler was just as large as the robot. HMMMMMMMMM

For the third field trip, we again took sea perch, but the waves were too intense to launch. We settled into gathering akulikuli to make propagations of it in order to replant the inland fishpond and allow more indigenous plants to take over Waihe'e! By this time I had contact with the fairy godmothers over at Women in technology and Maui Economic Development Board. Using ARC-GIS software, we had a geomentor who would work with my students to create a template to upload all our information. Until then, we'd use Google Earth as our platform.

Hurrah! We had a plan, and now everything began to fall into place. I learned of using ipads with a wireless microscope to immediately take photos and upload them to google earth. I learned about using the ipod as a way to access the database and upload information almost seamlessly, at least in the future. First we had to learn how to use all this technology.

So the last of the MEDB grant money was used to bring our students to Waihe'e, provide a sub teacher, provide new equipment, and allow us to take the next series of steps to sharing the data we had for three years! We took our last field trip on Thursday March 10 with a loud group of excellent Hui Po'okela kids (over 50 in all). The success of the trip was tremendous! And now we really have got to get down to work and organize all this data!

Can you see what a whirlwind of a year it has been?