I hope by now you have heard about my pet project of the moment: #scicommchall! For #scicommchall, I give myself (and quite a few other people by now) monthly challenges related to trying out new science communication formats. And this month, we are doing science communication books for kids! (For more instructions, see #scicommchall’s post. And everybody is welcome to join!).
My book deals with learning to observe where the wind is coming from (English version at the end of this post, too).
I think it turned out quite nicely!
I did struggle a little with the very short format — only six pages inside the book, plus a cover — but quite liked the challenge of having to come to the point.
The flag on the cover, in case you were wondering, is that of my hometown Hamburg.
I hope this book is actually useful and fun for kids (I did include some kids’ humor, or at least I tried ;-))
And I know what I would include if I wasn’t too lazy to re-draw the images: A question about on which side of some kind of structure one would sit down if one wanted shelter from the wind. Bummer I forgot to include that!
Anyway, here is the download (German & English). Please let me know what you think, I’d love to get some feedback!
5 years of “Adventures in Oceanography and Teaching”!
Today I am celebrating my blog’s 5th Birthday! 5 years of documenting my “Adventures in Oceanography and Teaching”. That feels both like an enormous amount of time, while at the same time it feels like only yesterday that I started one evening on the spur of the moment while sitting on the couch at my friend A&I’s former apartment, babysitting (Happy anniversary, A&I!).
When I started, I did not really have much of a plan of what I wanted to do with the blog, in the beginning I didn’t even plan on sharing it with anyone. I had, at that point, been teaching and doing science communication in oceanography for several years, and had done some pretty cool and innovative stuff (if I say so myself). Only trouble: I did not remember what I had done from one year to the next!
Kitchen oceanography
The main thing I wanted to archive were “kitchen oceanography” experiments: Experiments on processes related to the ocean that can be done using only household items. In honour of my blog’s 5th Birthday I have gone through some 700 posts introduced the new category, “kitchen oceanography“, to bring together all the blog posts that match that description. And it’s quite impressive how much cool science stuff you can do using only things you have in your home anyway!
I am a big fan of those experiments that can be done impromptu — for using them in teaching and outreach as planned features, as well as just whipping something out when the opportunity presents itself (for example on a skiing trip using our last drops of red wine as dye tracer). Once people get over the initial “what kind of kindergarden trick are we about to be presented with here?” reluctance, they ALWAYS get so engaged and want to start experimenting themselves. Those are the best moments!
Observations everywhere: from my sink to rivers to the sea
Another kind of teaching resource I wanted to archive on my blog were observations that I was making every day but didn’t have a good way to store: Oceanography in my kitchen sink, on puddles at the bus stop, in drains during a huge downpour (I was still living in Bergen back then), and when looking at the sea. There is so much physics everywhere that most people don’t notice, and as a proud, semi-new-ish smartphone owner, I had so many examples of what people could observe if they knew what to look for. I wanted to collect all those pictures together, have them searchable by keyword, and have them at hand whenever I wanted to show them to someone, whether in teaching or any other occasion.
Literature on teaching, learning, science communication
And then I had started reading literature on teaching and learning, and later on science communication. And while a good system to archive your literature is necessary in any case, I liked the idea of summarising relevant literature for the readers of my blog (and for my own reference, too). So that became the third main “genre” of blog posts on my blog.
Building an archive
So yes, the main idea when starting this blog was that I needed some way to archive pictures of experiments I had done together with short descriptions in a way that was easily searchable. For a while I had used Facebook (and I did like all the positive feedback I got when I posted pictures of experiments!) but in the end I wanted something I could customise to meet my needs and that would stay “mine” independent of what happened to other platforms.
Maintaining curiosity
But there were so many other benefits to this blog that I came to realise over time! The biggest one for me personally is that I now have a “reason” to get out my phone, snap a picture of the layers in my latte or other interesting features I come across in my daily life, and think about them more than just in passing. And it makes me so happy when I bake cupcakes with my sister just to use them for a blog post on ice coring or borrow a huge set for experiments on venturi tubes. I don’t think I would have gone to all that trouble if I didn’t have a blog to post the pictures on, and I would have missed out on so much fun! To me, doing those things is really rewarding and something I definitely want in my life.
Building a portfolio
But since the blog sometimes make me go to more trouble that I would without, and since I want it to be an archive of all this stuff, it has become a great portfolio. Going back over those 700-ish blogposts to tag all the “kitchen oceanography” ones, I noticed different phases related to different employers and places I lived at, but also in how much effort I put into blogging. And my blog has definitely become an asset: Based on what I put online here, I am fairly regularly contacted by people who ask for advice on teaching and especially experiments, or by people who found my blog for other purposes, for example for finding out how much salt there is in seawater in order to use it to beak bread! And I really value the interactions that have risen from people reading things on my blog and then getting in touch with me. I would never have been able to build such a diverse and fascinating network of people around me had it not been for my blog!
Professional development
And then this blog has had a huge influence on my professional development. Not only have I gotten over the fear of writing and publishing things online completely. I have also, by building this portfolio, created opportunities for myself that might not have been possible otherwise: I changed from a traditional postdoctoral career in oceanography research into providing advice to oceanographers and climate scientists on their teaching and science communication! And this is the career I have been dreaming of long before I was able to put it into words, and then long before realising that I had already put it into words, because it lets me combine the best of both exciting worlds: Oceanography and teaching!
So now that I knew I wanted to do the book in water colours, and with fairly realistically-looking people in it, I started sketching out what I wanted individual images to look like. I had a couple of requirements:
I only wanted to show Line from behind, so a) she wouldn’t be offended by how I painted her face, and b) I wouldn’t have to do paint her face ;-)
Since I was going to scan the images in order to digitalize them to be able to finish and print the book, I wanted to be able to insert rectangular images (rather than weirdly shaped ones) to get clean borders where the scanned paper (which likely wouldn’t come out as completely white) meets the white of the printed pages
I wanted the images to be square, so I could have the one or two sentences that should accompany each of them underneath
So here is the sketch of the first four images in the book. I am never quite sure whether in the fourth one one can actually recognize what is going on. And at this stage I really considered doing the whole book as sketches with a normal pen because I quite looked how it came out!
But sketches is not what I went with in the end… Stay tuned for more! :-)
When November came around, I needed to actually stop imagining the book I wanted to give to Line for Christmas, I had to start creating. But where to start?
I wanted Line to recognize herself despite me painting her only from the back (guess why? Yep, I did not want to have to do faces!). So I inquired with my sister about the color of Line’s rain clothes. Because on the day the pictures above were taken we did bring her rain pants, but didn’t put them on her…. And also we then were both in blue trousers and red jackets, and that seemed a little boring in a picture book that would be mainly blue anyway.
Turns out that she basically had rain clothes in all colors and I could just pick whatever outfit I wanted…
In my head, I had had a vision of all these beautiful water colour (ha! no pun intended) pictures that I wanted to include in the book. But turns out that the last time I did anything with water colours was in 2003 (yep, that was the date on the last picture on my water color pad), so the idea put me off a little because it seemed like a lot of work. On the other hand, I didn’t want to have black-and-white sketches only, because I wanted good depictions of the wave phenomena (because I wanted my goddaughter to enjoy reading the book, but also to learn about waves at the same time…). So I played around with water colours a little and it turned out to not be as bad as I had imagined…
Then, I decided that I would actually put some effort into getting the proportions right, so I used a picture taken of Line and me at an art exhibition earlier that year.
This lead to the ratios seen below:
But it’s still a long way from this to a finished book… So stay tuned! :-)
This one has been a long time in the making. Last year, I wrote and illustrated a book for my goddaughter as a Christmas present. I didn’t manage to finish it early enough to go through the publisher I had used for my first book and have it ready for Christmas, so I printed and bound it myself and pretty much forgot about it. Until now — last night I sent it to the publisher and I should receive the proofs in a couple of days! Super exciting!
Luckily, my goddaughter is as much into water as I am, so we have always had a lot of fun playing in puddles.
One day, we had so much fun that Line ended up completely wet. These pictures are from that day… And they served as inspiration for my new book!
Here is a peek into the making of the book. I had known for a while that I wanted to do a children’s picture book on waves.
The story line is pretty straightforward: Line and her aunt (me!) are going for a walk and discover different kinds of wave phenomena. Basically, I came up with a small story around everything you find as photos in my first book, except this time I painted it (and included Line and myself in most of the pictures).
This is what my story board looks like:
Curious where we are going from there? I’ll be back with a post on my next steps in a couple of days!
I’ve been wanting to develop a good fjord circulation experiment for a long time now — I wasn’t happy with the one we used back when I was teaching in Bergen, and then 1.5 years ago I talked with Steffi and Ailin who took over the tank experiments in Bergen a while back and we wanted to do something about it, but it just never happened. Life, you know, and jobs with other foci…
But then when I couldn’t sleep, I decided that 4:15 in the morning is a very good time to sketch out how I would develop a learning sequence on fjord circulation. Let’s see how I feel about it at a more normal hour after some more sleep, but right now I am happy with it, and excited to flesh out the sketch a little more with actual instructions for experiments. Would you be interested in reading that? And where would you look for instructions like that (except for on my blog)? I am hoping to maybe publish it somewhere “official”…
We are excited and grateful for a great opportunity for continued collaboration that has recently presented itself: Elin won a Bjerknes Visiting Fellowship 2018 for me to visit her and the rest of her team in Bergen for a month in 2018!
We have several goals for that visit, but the main one is to develop more hands-on experiments (which we lovingly call “kitchen oceanography”), which parents, teachers, and other educators can use to get children excited about oceanography (and obviously for the grown-ups to play with, too :-)). Between Elin and me, we do already have a lot of experiments which we use regularly and recommend (for Elin’s, check out this site, and mine are here). But we would love to bring them in a different format so that they are easy to find and use, and are well integrated with the ekte data project. And then, obviously, we want to let everybody in Bergen (and all of our faithful readers) know where to find the experiments, and how to use them in science communication.
So plenty of stuff to stay tuned for! We’ll absolutely keep you posted on our progress on here!
This is neither “oceanography” nor “teaching”, but so much “adventure” that these pictures still deserve their spot on “Adventures in oceanography and teaching”. I did a tour into two (non-active ;-)) volcanoes and it was AMAZING!
You know I like tank experiments, but what I am lucky enough to witness right now is NOTHING compared to even my wildest dreams. Remember all the rotating experiments we did with this rotating table back in Bergen?
Those were awesome, no question about that. But the rotating tank I am at now? 13 meters diameter.
Yes, you read that correctly. 13 METERS DIAMETER!
I’m lucky enough to be involved in Elin Darelius & team’s research project on topographically steered currents in Antarctica, and I will be blogging on her blog about it:
In any case, don’t miss the opportunity to see what is going on in a tank this size:
Yes, they are both INSIDE the tank. Elin (on the left) is sitting on the tank’s floor, Nadine (on the right) is climbing on the topography representing Antarctica. For more details, head over to the blog!
