Floating Classroom with Surf, Skate, Science

Overview

On December 5th, 2024, the International SeaKeepers Society hosted a floating classroom with sixteen students and nine chaperones and educators of Surf, Skate, Science in Miami, Florida. We started the day by meeting our group at the docks of FIU’s Biscayne Bay Campus and beginning with a discussion on our local waterways and what parameters and methodologies we use to study the health of Biscayne Bay and the oceans. We also talked a great deal about the nature and history of South Florida’s watershed as well as how we impact it positively and negatively. Following the discussion, students were split into groups and learned how to test the water quality of Biscayne Bay using our Earth Echo kits. They were easily able to perform tests analyzing temperature, pH, dissolved oxygen, and turbidity. Students made several inferences and observations about the differences in readings between groups as well as some predictions on why we got the readings we did. Following our experiment, we arrived at Sandspur Island, where after giving out resources our students set to cleaning the island of a great deal of its trash and pollution. By the end of the day, our amazing students were able to remove more than 17 pounds of trash from the island and Biscayne Bay! To conclude our day, we discussed the best ways to reduce, reuse, and recycle in our daily lives as we made our way back to the docks. We give a huge thanks to the students, families, and teachers of Surf, Skate, Science, to DISCOVERY Yacht River Queen for a great morning out on the water, and hope to see some of the students at future SeaKeepers events.