I’ve been talking about the importance of leaving room for topics that students are really interested in for a long time. Today, I want to tell you about my first experience with this: Back in 2012, in my first year teaching the “introduction to oceanography course”, a student came up to me after the first […]
I’d love your input: If your student lab for GFD tank experiments had to downsize, but you had to present a “wish list” for a smaller replacement, what would be on that list? Below are my considerations, but I would be super grateful for any additional input or comments! :-) Background and “boundary conditions” The […]
So how do we teach about the Coriolis force? The following is a shortened version of an article that Pierre de Wet and I wrote when I was still in Bergen, check it out here. The Coriolis demonstration A demonstration observing a body on a rotating table from within and from outside the rotating system […]
A couple of pointers on how to use concept maps in class. I recently presented concept maps as a tool both here and in a workshop I co-taught. And I was pleasantly surprised by how many people said that they were considering employing this tool in their class! So for those of you who might […]
Drawing concept maps at the beginning, the middle and the end of the course. Using concept maps in teaching is something that I first tried last year in both the GEOF130 and CMM31 courses. The idea is that coming in, students typically don’t have a very good overview over the topics and concepts that are […]
What level of proficiency do you need to communicate about science? This post is not strictly about oceanography, but I started thinking about it in the context of a class I taught recently, where I was teaching in a foreign language to me and most of the students. After one of the classes, a student […]
How to make lectures in a foreign language less scary for the students. The class that I have until recently taught in Bergen, GEOF130, is taken by students in oceanography and meteorology in the second year of their Bachelor at the university. It is the first course they take at the Geophysical Institute – their […]
The first student cruise I ever taught while being taught by one of the greatest teachers myself. As you might have noticed from the last four or so blog posts, I really enjoy teaching student cruises and I think they are a super important part of the oceanography education. So let me tell you about […]
When a CTD profile suddenly looks really weird. As mentioned before, student cruises seem to bring out the weird experiences with CTDs. My theory is that it’s the world testing us. It would be bad enough to deal with this stuff if we were on CTD watch in the middle of the night on our […]
When a CTD just doesn’t start pumping. In this post, I talked about how student cruises always happen to be on the perfect days, and then in this post I talked about how to read CTD profiles. So now knowing all of this, here is a confession: I have never seen so much weird stuff happen […]
Why student cruises always end up being on the most beautiful days of the year, or: why student cruises are an important part of the education. Remember the picture I showed in the last post, that was worthy of being on an Advent calendar or postcard? The one below? That was taken on this year’s […]
About teaching in a language that is a foreign language for both your students and yourself. Most of my teaching so far has happened in English to mainly non-native English speakers with the occasional native speaker thrown in. One thing that I realized recently was that concepts that are definitely not common knowledge at home […]
Confusing students even more by discussing how momentum is being transferred from the tank to the water. As you remember, we are preparing for the Ekman experiment and need to spin up the tank to solid body rotation. We had started discussing how, when observed from the co-rotating camera, particles seem to be slowing down […]
Spinning up a tank until all water particles move with the same angular velocity. Before running the Ekman spiral experiment, the tank needs to be spun up to solid body rotation. Even though the concept itself is not difficult, it seems to be difficult to determine when a body of water has reached the point […]
Tank experiment showing (the effects of) the Ekman spiral. One experiments that has been run in GEOF130 forever is the “Ekman spiral” experiment. A tank filled with water is spun up to solid body rotation on a rotating table. Then the tank is slowed down. The resulting friction between the water body and the tank […]
A tank experiment showing ship-generated internal waves. When entering a fjord from the open ocean by ship, it can sometimes be noted that the speed of the ship changes even though apparently nothing else changed – the wind didn’t change, the position of the sails didn’t change, the settings on the engine didn’t change – […]
The experiment we run to discuss the velocity of shallow water waves. In this post, I discussed how it took us several years to modify an experiment to make it both student and teacher-friendly. But what can you actually see in that experiment? The movies below show the type of standing waves that are excited […]
Improving one of the experiments run in the GEOF130 lab. One experiment that has been run in GEOF130 forever is the “standing wave”, where a wave is excited in a long and narrow tank and then, for different water depths, the period is measured and the velocity calculated in order to compare it to the […]
Students acting out the process of sound being refracted towards the region of minimum speed. We’ve been talking about refraction lately. Waves get bent in the direction of lower velocity. This holds for light and sound and even ocean waves. However, students find it conceptually difficult to understand why waves are being bent towards lower […]
A solution for the siphon problem of the fjord circulation experiment. After having run the fjord circulation experiments for several years in a row with several groups of students each year, Pierre and I finally figured out a good way to keep the water level in the tank constant. As you might remember from the […]
Tank experiment on a typical circulation in a fjord. Traditionally, a fjord circulation experiment has been done in GEOF130’s student practicals. Pierre and I recently met up to test-run the experiment before it will be run in this year’s course. This is the setup of the experiment: A long and narrow tank, filled with salt water, […]
A seesaw to visualize how standing waves move in an enclosed basin. In enclosed basins, standing waves can occur. In the simplest case, they have a node in the middle and the largest amplitudes at the edges of the basin. The movement of the water’s surface then closely resembles that of a seesaw. Extremely simple […]
Visualization of progressive waves: wave form and energy move forward while the rope itself stays in place. When I talked about waves in GEOF130 recently, in order to explain the concept of progressive waves, I showed a drawing from one of the textbooks, where someone was moving a rope such that waves traveled on the […]
Movie on how the most important instrument in oceanography works. On our cruise on the WHOI research vessel Knorr in 2011, Sindre Skrede (find him on twitter or vimeo for many more exciting pictures and movies!) and I made a movie for his blog, describing the most important oceanographic instrument. We recently translated the movie from Norwegian to […]
A photo of internal waves in the atmosphere. Internal waves exist on the interface between fluids of different densities. In the ocean they are mostly observed through their surface imprint. In the tank, we could also observe them by looking in from the side, but this is hardly feasible in the ocean. But luckily vision […]
A movie focusing on details of the lee waves in the tank. In this post, we investigated lee waves in a tank in a general way. Here, I want to show a detail of those lee waves: In this movie, the concept of hydraulic control becomes visible. On the upstream side of the mountain, the […]
How internal waves in the ocean can be spotted on the surface. Under certain conditions, internal waves in the ocean can be spotted at the ocean’s surface due to changes in surface roughness or to the movement of floating foam or debris. They can be spotted if half their wavelength is longer than the distance […]
Lee wave experiment in a large tank with a moving mountain. In this previous post, we talked about internal waves in a very simple experiment. But Geophysical Institute has a great tank to do lee wave experiments with that I want to present here (although it doesn’t seem to be clear what will happen to the […]
Internal waves are shown in simple 0.5l bottles. Waves travel on the interface between fluids of different densities and the phase speed of those waves depends on the density difference between the two fluids. The simplest way to demonstrate this in class can be seen below – two 0.5l plastic bottles are used, one half-filled […]
A very simple visualization of rock folding. See? When I said “very simple” I meant “very simple”. But it does help explain why sometimes rock layers are not nice and horizontal. This demo works really well with a piece of paper towel, too, especially if that is grabbed from a dispenser in the lecture theatre […]
Ice formation in the ocean – using my own photos to tell the story. Recently I talked about using my own photo to explain the generation of wind-generated waves to students. And then I realized that there is another set of photos that I have been using for teaching purposes for years that I could […]
Using a photo from one of my research cruises to explain the formation of wind waves. Wind waves are (surprise coming up!) waves generated by wind that blows over the ocean’s surface. The size of those waves depends on several factors: The strength of the wind, the length of time the wind has been blowing […]
Instruction for a very simple DIY tidal model. Today, we built a very simple DIY tidal model in class. It consists of two sets of tidal bulges: One locked in place relative to the sun on the piece of cardboard that we use as the base, the other one with its very own little moon […]
More details on the structure of fresh water and salt water ice. Fresh water and salt water ice have very different structures as I already discussed in this post. In the image above you see that the structures are very different. Whereas fresh water ice is clear and transparent, salt water ice has a porous structure […]
How do you introduce voting cards as a new method in a way that minimizes student resistance? As all new methods, voting cards (see post on the method here, and on what kind of questions to ask here) first seem scary. After all, students don’t know what will happen if they happen to chose the wrong […]
Different didactical settings in which the “ice cubes melting in fresh and salt water” experiment can be used. In part 1 and 2 of this series, I showed two different ways of using the “ice cubes melting in fresh water and salt water” experiment in lectures. Today I want to back up a little bit […]
Visualization of how much salt is actually contained in sea water. When preparing “sea water samples” for class, it is always astonishing to me how much salt I have to add for normal open-ocean salinities. Time and time again it looks like it should be way too much, but then when tasting it, it tastes […]
The “ice cubes melting in fresh water and salt water” experiment the way I usually use it in class. — Edit — For an updated description of this experiment please go to this page! — Edit — You might remember the “ice cubes melting in fresh water and salt water experiment” from a couple of […]
Different ways of posing questions for concept tests are being presented here Concept tests using voting cards have been presented in this post. Here, I want to talk about different types of questions that one could imagine using for this method. 1) Classical multiple choice In the classical multiple choice version, for each question four […]
Voting cards. A low-tech concept test tool, enhancing student engagement and participation. (Post 1/3) Voting cards are a tool that I learned about from Al Trujillo at the workshop “teaching oceanography” in San Francisco in 2013. Basically, voting cards are a low-tech clicker version: A sheet of paper is divided into four quarters, each quarter […]
A hands-on activity in which students use real data to find similarities in the sea surface height and the ocean depth along satellite tracks. In yesterday’s GEOF130 class, we explored how the sea surface height and the ocean depth are related. All we needed: Sticky notes, scissors and this work sheet (as always – leave a […]
Hands-on activity to better understand the concept and consequences of heat capacity. Also a great party trick. Imagine you take a balloon. Any kind of normal balloon. You blow it up. You hold it over a candle flame. What do you think will happen? Yes – it will burst pretty instantly. Now imagine you are […]
My favorite experiment. Quick and easy and very impressive way to illustrate the influence of temperature on water densities. Today in the “introduction to oceanography” (GEOF130) we conducted my favorite experiment ever: Cold water in one of the small bottles is dyed blue, hot water in the other small bottle is dyed red. Both are […]
Extremely simple experiment to illustrate the effect of density differences. At room temperature, will coke cans float or sink in freshwater? And how about coke light? Btw, this experiment is only easy if you are in a country where you can get the right soda brand both in normal and in light version in cans. […]
Three in-class experiments run in parallel. Great if you want to discuss how properties are measured and what kind of difficulties you might encounter. Temperature, salinity and density are the most important properties in physical oceanography. Measuring them with a CTD is easy. But can you, using basic household items, build instruments to measure those properties? My […]
Hands-on activity on sea water salinity In the first lecture of the “introduction to oceanography” GEOF130 course 2013, we investigated water samples from four different regions: The Mediterranean, the tropical North Atlantic, the Baltic and Arctic sea ice. Just by tasting their different salinities (40psu, 35psu, 10psu and 5psu, respectively) students figured out which of […]
