Sharing What We've Learned Through Ocean Tracks

I first learned of the Oceans of Data Institute because they had a great idea.

ODI had just finished a massive body of work, trying to learn how best to use visualizations in classrooms to get students to work effectively with data. They had read hundreds of journal articles and spoken with dozens of experts in all aspects of learning. They compiled all of their knowledge into a report, called Visualizing Oceans of Data: Educational Interface Design. And their great idea was to take all that learning, apply it to building their own educational interface, using an interesting data set that might inspire students to engage with the data.

At that time, I was fortunate to have been involved in a decade-long program of studying the migrations of large, open ocean animals in the Pacific. The Tagging of Pacific Predators (TOPP) program, as it was called, involved more than 85 scientists from 5 different countries. Between 2000 and 2010, we deployed more than 4,300 electronic tags on 23 different species including whales, seals, sharks, tunas, turtles and even squid. Using these data, in combination with environmental measurements from satellites and buoys, TOPP scientists were working to answer fundamental questions about where animals go, what they do, and how their physical surroundings affect their behavior.

As it turned out, this was exactly the kind of data set the ODI team was looking for. So we set out to create a unique user interface, specifically designed to allow students to explore these data to pursue some of the same kinds of questions that had been posed by my scientific colleagues at TOPP. This project came to be known as Ocean Tracks, and it has now been through several rounds of development, testing, and refinement – initially with high school students, and now in undergraduate classrooms.

As with any undertaking of this magnitude, we’ve learned a great deal from the experience. Having applied the guidelines from Visualizing Oceans of Data: Educational Interface Design to the design of our own educational interface, we wanted to capture our “lessons learned” in a companion volume, Ocean Tracks: A Case Study. We’ve come to appreciate the complex relationship that exists between interface design, curriculum development, teacher professional development, and student achievement. If you are creating educational interfaces or visualizations, we hope that the insights from both the original report and case study will serve as a helpful resource.

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