Created in 2012, The Health of the Ocean Matters to Me explores the role of the ocean from the perspective of local middle school kids in Seward, AK. A mini grant from NOAA provided the Ocean Sciences Club with video cameras to record a year-end message summarizing their relationships to Alaska’s marine ecosystems.
The Ocean Sciences Club is a program hosted and led by the Education Department of the Alaska SeaLife Center. It is an after-school program focused towards students in grades 6-12, designed to inspire and engage teens in learning about marine science. The club fosters critical thinking skills, supports future ocean stewards, bolsters National Ocean Science Bowl performance and provides a safe, fun and interactive environment for young people to learn from one another. The club’s curriculum is rooted in the seven Ocean Literacy Principles as defined by NOAA, of which they believe number six is especially correlated to the founding goals of the club: The ocean and humans are inextricably interconnected.
The club meets every Wednesday night during the school year. Stop by and check in if you are interested in what they are up to. They may be dissecting a giant Humboldt Squid, practicing blowgun tranquilizer skills with the vets in the Wildlife Response Department, watching sea ice melt (it’s way cooler than it sounds), rearticulating a Steller sea lion skeleton, or playing the ever popular Fox-Lemming-Jeager-Eider game. Find out more information about the club at: http://oceansciencesclub.tumblr.com/
See the full list of contest films.