Floating Classroom with Eco Scouts

Overview

On Thursday, September 19th, 2024, The International SeaKeepers Society hosted a second Floating Classroom with students and families of Eco Scouts. We met with twelve kindergarten through 8th grade students as well as four chaperones and fellow educators at the research docks of Florida International University’s Biscayne Bay satellite campus. Once gathered, we hopped aboard DISCOVERY Vessel River Queen. We made our way into northern Biscayne Bay where we participated in a lecture and discussion about the flow of our connected waterways around South Florida, with emphasis on various types of ocean currents, the mixing and stratification of different waterways and estuary systems, and even what the jobs of real-life marine biologists and oceanographers look like. We also touched on the nature of the watershed and how we impact it both negatively through pollution and plastics and positively through research and conservation efforts. The week of this Floating Classroom has seen king tides arrive in Biscayne Bay, so we took the opportunity to talk about the effects of the rise and fall of tides. Following our discussion, students demonstrated their knowledge of how water of differing parameters such as salinity and temperature might interact through an activity observing how the brackish water of the Bay interacted with our samples of extremely cold and hot water respectively. Our water samples were colored with food coloring to allow students to observe and make conclusions. Our students asked some amazing questions, made great conclusions about what we saw, and even suggested ways to fine-tune our experiment. Now armed with a much wider baseline of knowledge, we finished our day with a second activity called Sink or Float, where we introduced different types of common plastics and had students guess based on observations and our sample materials whether each type of plastic would sink or float in our Bay waters. Our students proved to be natural scientists, only getting one out of six possible plastics wrong! We had an amazing day with the students and teachers of Eco Scouts and thank them all for their hard work, excellent questions, and great discussion. We also thank D/Y River Queen for all of their time and for a fantastic day out on Biscayne Bay and hope to see some of these students at future events.