Mirjam Sophia Glessmer

A scicomm comic on Rossby waves and hands-on teaching

Last year in pre-social distancing times, Torge and I brought hands-on rotating tank experiments into his “atmosphere and ocean dynamics” class. The “dry theory to juicy reality” project was a lot of fun — the affordable DIYnamics rotating tables are great to give students hands-on experiences in small groups and to see — by running the same experiment on four rotating tables in parallel — how the same experimental setup can lead to very different realizations because of tiny differences in boundary conditions.

Instead of a classical lab report, we asked students to write a pupular science text about an experiment of their choosing. We got lots of great results (see all of them on our blog “Teaching Ocean Science“), but there is one that particularly stood out to me, and the author, Johanna Knauf, kindly agreed to me publishing it here. Enjoy!


I am super impressed with this comic, and also increadibly flattered and touched. This comic is the most meaningful feedback on my teaching and science communication I ever got and that I can possibly imagine. Thank you, Johanna!

P.S.: Curious about how we modified the project to work with social distancing? Check it out here!

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  1. […] Bild aus dem Comic der Studentin Johanna Knauf, das zeigt, dass auch in der Wahrnehmung der Studierenden die beiden Lehrenden mit Enthusiasmus und […]

  2. […] case that’s great, too! One thing that we’ve done recently is to ask students to write blog or social media posts instead of classical lab reports and that worked out really well and seems to have motivated them a […]

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