Students will demonstrate the different methods used to clean up after an oil spill and gain an understanding of the difficulties that are encountered. 

Students use a variety of materials to construct various models of plankton to gain an understanding of neutral buoyancy.

The goal of this activity is to get students thinking about oil in the ocean, and in particular about the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill and the challenging cleanup efforts. Each pair of students will have a water-filled tray to represent the Gulf of Mexico and a set of materials to respond to the simulated oil spill.

This activity is useful for a wide range of ages and works well in a camp or classroom setting. This challenge, including introduction, hands-on activity, and discussion, takes about 1 hour.

The Adventures of Zack and Molly is a new, four-part video series about an unlikely duo exploring the deep ocean produced by ECOGIG in collaboration with Sherman's Lagoon creator and filmmaker Jim Toomey.

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

The Learning Guide provides discussion points, connections to Next Generation Science Standards, hands-on activities, and further resources. Spanish version available here. 

Join Ocean Portal Editor-in-Chief Emily Frost and museum educators from the National Museum of Natural History as they guide you through the Ocean Portal website, exploring a multitude of digital assets including vetted scientific information, interactive content, and education resources.

This activity is a fun, basic craft, but can be adapted to incorporate structure and function lessons in a classroom setting. Students will build their own fish from a paper plate, decorate it, and learn about the function of each of their fish’s fins in the process.

This lesson is created to stress the idea of interrelationships among organisms and how this can effect the surrounding environment. This lesson also goes step by step through the scientific approach to developing and implementing a scientific research study. Students are expected to write their own ideas about the best way to investigate the scientific questions provided, and compare their ideas to those of the actual researcher.

Students will play a game as a class to learn about living and non-living components of an ecosystem and natural cycles. By exploring the relationship between a coral reef seastar and the resources in its environment, students will begin to understand an animal’s reliance on its ecosystem and all its parts. A follow-up PowerPoint lesson is available on the MCR LTER education website to emphasize the concepts introduced in this lesson in a more formal format and bring in more ecosystem state standards.

Students will play a game in order to learn about predator-prey relationships, a simple food chain, and the coral reef ecosystem. Students will act the parts of various reef fishes, to explore the relationship between predators and their prey. When the lights are on, damselfish emerge from hiding in the reef to forage for food. At night, however, individual damselfish race against one another to find shelter in the reef. Damselfish that do not successfully find refuge at night may be eaten by nocturnally feeding squirrelfish. Squirrelfish do not come out to eat during the day for fear of being eaten by their predators, large emperors. These predator-prey relationships are altered as the coral reef habitat is damaged by pollution throughout the game. A follow-up PowerPoint is available on the MCR LTER education website to emphasize the concepts introduced in this lesson in a more formal format. Download the supplementary PowerPoint. 

This lesson combines Life Science and Investigation State Standards as it builds on the MCR LTER Connected Ecosystems lesson. Students will explore the concepts of living and nonliving components that make up an ecosystem by looking at how temperature determines the ranges of kelp and coral. Students will incorporate reasoning skills as they discuss kelp and coral temperature ranges, using the In Hot Water PowerPoint, then construct and interpret graphs of real yearly temperature data collected by the MCR LTER.