It’s so hard to believe that we are already 4 weeks in! Time flies when you’re having fun. The summer here at Horn Point Lab has been very exciting and interactive. The team is amazing–I absolutely love working with them. Meetings for the module are engaging and very creative. I love the different points of view that each member of the team contributes. We recently finished the “Learn” and “Explore” pages of the module and we are very excited about the results. I am learning a lot from the team, and I feel that we will all leave this experience having much more knowledge about scientific research and communicating science to the general public.

We recently worked on our first activity for the “Teach” page titled, “Whacky Watersheds,” which allows us and students express our creativity through building a model watershed.  We are currently continuing to work on the Teach page by creating more activities that follow our theme, “From Land to Sea.”  Soon we will get the opportunity to go out into to the field to collect samples (and get DIRTY!) for our lab’s research in the coming weeks.

Over the next six weeks our COSEE Coastal Trends Scientist-Educator Partnership team will be posting a series of blogs to document our experience. Last week our team attended orientation and learned about the program, concept mapping, conceptual diagrams, and each other. I would like to quickly introduce you to our four-member team.

Dr. Tom Fisher is a professor at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science (UMCES) Horn Point Lab (HPL) whose research interests consist of watershed ecology, biogeochemisty, and more.

Claire Sargo is a high school science teacher from Mount de Sales Academy in Catonsville, MD.

Shadaesha Green is an undergraduate student studying Marine and Environmental Science at Hampton University in Virginia.

And I, Lindsay Tempinson, am a graduate student at Horn Point Lab studying streams.

Concept map developed by the team.

At orientation our team selected the topic “From Land to the Sea”, which will focus on watersheds and the interactions between land, streams, and the sea. During orientation, we also shared the concept maps that we each created of our lives highlighting the people, places, and events that influenced us. In addition, we worked to develop a concept map of our topic, emphasizing key information.  A game of Conceptionary, like Pictionary but with concepts instead of words, allowed us to express our artistic sides and learn about alternative ways to present information.  Overall orientation gave us the opportunity to gain a better understanding of our topic and get to know each other better.  A huge thanks to those that organized, presented, and offered advice during orientation!