Young Ocean Explorers (2022)
Who
Steve and Riley Hathaway
2019 - 2021
Awarded
$216,000
The Young Ocean Explorers website (https://www.youngoceanexplorers.com/), launched in October 2017, is a free resource designed to support teachers to confidently teach students about marine life and how to care for the ocean. The resource has nine curriculum links across five subjects and provides teachers access to short videos, quizzes, polls and assignments on marine animals, endangered species, the living world, ecology, sustainability and the environment.
Young Ocean Explorers provided stories from the Hauraki Gulf and the marine world to motivate and encourage students to be influencers of change. The website contains teaching tools, entertaining education and young presenters that young people naturally connect and engage with.
The main activity supported by G.I.F.T funding was the creation of a 21 Day Challenge—Restoring the Hauraki Gulf. The challenge is a 21 day guided enquiry, with lesson plans developed by teachers, for teachers. The challenge also included professional development opportunities for teachers and promotion at National Young Leaders Day events.
The objectives of the challenge were:
· To encourage an increased knowledge of the ocean, particularly the Hauraki Gulf.
· To build an understanding of the importance of the ocean to many people in various ways.
· To think about how we can be kaitiaki and care for our ocean.
The team has woven a Te Ao Māori lens throughout the 21 Day Challenge, by using the new Young Ocean Explorers Rangatahi content (about 90mins of content). A Māori teacher who is passionate about bringing this perspective into schools, took part in a two day teacher workshop.
The intention (prior to the COVID-19 pandemic) was for 2000 classes to participate in 2020. However, the COVID-19 pandemic meant the that the programme was scaled back with schools in lockdown and closed to visitors for much of the year.
In 2021, 1206 classes signed up for the 21 Day Challenge. There were at least 58,000 engaged users[1] of the Young Oceans Explorers website with over 92,000 views of the Hauraki Gulf specific content.
Hauraki Gulf catchment schools participating in the 21 Day Challenge 2021
As part of the challenge students were encouraged to collect plastic rubbish. Students uploaded photos of 130,014 pieces of plastic during the challenge.
Feedback from teachers and students included:
“We have really enjoyed the 21 day challenge and even the teachers have learnt a lot about the state of the Hauraki Gulf that we were not aware of” Teacher.
“We have watched most of the Young Ocean Explorer videos and enjoyed doing the one plus a day. We also tried the mussel filtering experiment. We love doing your tasks and we are excited to learn more” Students.
The following is an example of the type of content uploaded by classes as part of the 21 Day Challenge.
Next steps
Young Oceans Explorers plan to use insights from the first year of the 21 Day Challenge to identify how they can make it even better and scale the numbers of classes participating. The team is also building their understanding of Te Ao Māori and the cultural context that they are working in.
The team is also investigating ways they can encourage schools to stay engaged with Tīkapa Moana after the challenge finishes. They want to help students to feel more connected to the Gulf. One idea is to encourage each school during the Challenge to create a long-term legacy project that they can start in their local community, that will help restore the mauri of Tīkapa Moana. The idea is to engage students as citizen scientists, so they can start building a quantitative data set to help demonstrate long-term changes.
Links to the videos funded through G.I.F.T