Aquaculture and kelp project - update
Friday 3 November 2023
Armed with a briefing document and six challenges provided by our local partner organisation, Akvahub, I launched this year's Group 4 Project in a one-hour after-school session.
The content from my slides is copied in the following boxes.
Collaboration
You have been placed in teams with a mixture of scientists. Each member of the team should contribute 10 hours:
- 2 hours - understanding requirements, context and ‘brainstorming’
- 5 hours - reading, talking, research and analysis
- 2 hours - ‘writing up’ and visiting other groups
- 1 hour - presentations
Overall, 9 of these hours have been provided for you. The final 1 is up to you (I’d recommend a couple of breakfast or dinner break-out meetings).
Science
There are 6 challenges. These have been allocated to 12 groups.
Everyone should read the opening pages about aquaculture and the general context. Then you should focus on your:
- Case
- Background
- Challenge
- Potential solutions
The aim is to propose a solution to Akvahub and the local aquaculture industry.
Research like a scientist
- Literature review
- Compare with existing cases
- Research question
- Hypothesis
- Ethics
- Observation
- Simulations
- Modelling
- Experiments
- Conclusion
- Evaluation
Learn like an IB student
- Communicators
- Open-minded
- Caring
- Risk-takers
- Balanced
- Reflective
Ways of getting help
Akvahub want this process to be interactive:
- They have developed the cases for us
- They will be present for the concluding phase on Wednesday 8th November
- They are willing to respond to three questions from each group! Use the slides within the shared folder.
When are we... done?
On Wednesday next week, representatives from your group will deliver a 5-minute presentation and respond to questions.
These presentations will (hopefully) be watched by First Year and Second Year science classes.
You will also share your completed work (e.g. slides or a report) with Akvahub using the shared folder.
Be creative :)
The challenges faced by students were connected to the following considerations in aquaculture in our region of Norway:
- Maintaining excellent water quality and sustainable waste management
- Energy, cost and effectiveness of sludge collection
- Operating closed-containment aquaculture systems
- Disease outbreaks
- Selecting suitable sites for seaweed farming
- Scaling up seaweed cultivation
Having collapsed a day of timetabled classes and activities as a sign of the importance of the Group 4 Project, we were able to involve teachers from across the IB Diploma Programme as supervisors. I encouraged them to be curious, ask questions, request mini-presentations nudge teams towards completion. Many have remarked at how impressive they found our students, and those who have lived here longest have not-too-distant memories of previous interactions between our school and our partners at Akvahub.
It never ceases to amaze me how, when we reduce the stakes to zero, students can manage to produce perfectly referenced reports, slides and speaker notes on complex topics having read widely and explored our natural environment. There must be some lessons we can learn for our IAs!
Next year we're likely to follow this route again, but with some small tweaks:
- If we could move things forward to the end of Year 1, we would have more daylight and less academic pressure
- Now that we have six challenges that we know are suitably stimulating, we can look into apparatus or even site visits to provide additional hands-on work
- I will emphasise the 10-hour requirement more clearly; some students thought they could declare themselves 'finished' before the end of the day
- Making an even bigger announcement in the lead-up to invite all in the school community to meet our student teams and find out about science with real-world implications
In short, our new partnership model has been a hit with our students and staff. All that remains is to find out what our partners at Akvahub think of our students' efforts during the presentations next week.