Award Winning Video Teaches Drone Technology for Oil Spill Research
(GoMRI)
The Gulf of Mexico Research Initiative congratulates the CARTHE research team for their first place award-winning video Drones at the Beach.
Over 37,000 middle school students across twenty-one countries selected the winning ocean science research videos after a two-month evaluation of the top entries that best explained scientific results and significance.
The Florida Center for Ocean Science Education Excellence (sponsor) and the National Science Foundation (funder) established the Ocean 180 Video Challenge to provide scientists a platform and an opportunity to translate research importance and outcomes to non-experts.
CARTHE’s winning video demonstrates the use of drones during their SCOPE experiment to understand how nearshore currents move contaminants in the water. One of the contest requirements was to have an accompanying peer-reviewed journal article, which the CARTHE team published in the 2015 American Meteorological Society Surf zone monitoring using rotary wing Unmanned Aerial Vehicles.
Graduate student Patrick Rynne, a member of the CARTHE video creation team, explained that the ability to communicate scientific findings is an essential skill to develop. “Although it is critical that research goes through the peer-review process, we also have a responsibility to deliver our findings in a digestible way to the public.”
Teacher Kathryn Blysma, whose students at Dr. John Long Middle School in Wesley Chapel, FL participated as judges applauded this effort to connect classroom lessons and scientific discoveries. “Too often, students only see science in isolation with the benchmarks assigned to them, rather than the real-world application of that learning,” said Blysma. “Making connections between classroom learning and the real-world is critical to being good stewards of our planet.”