Polar Quest
29.03.2012
Polar Quest logo
© International Polar Foundation
As a follow-up to the International Polar Year, the International Polar Foundation launched the Polar Quest project in September 2010, in which the Belgian Princess Elisabeth Antarctica (PEA) station plays a central role. It is supported by the Flemish Government’s “Wetenschap maakt knap” action plan.
It was conceived as a contest open to all Flemish 5th grade classes (17 years old), with the teacher of the winning class gaining the unique opportunity to take part in scientific research at PEA in Antarctica. Here is a short video summarizing what the Polar Quest was all about.
Objectives
- Increase students' understanding of and engagement in the Polar Regions and interest in polar science, technology, engineering, or mathematics (STEM) careers.
- Improve teacher content knowledge of multidisciplinary polar science.
- Develop new educational material to translate polar science to the classroom through inquiry-based learning.
- Improve polar researchers' understanding of and engagement in K-12 education to strengthen and enrich the outreach and dissemination of their research
Project description
Contest
31 classes participated in the contest, which took place in the academic year 2010-2011 and was won by teacher Koen Meirlaen and his students of the Leiepoort Deinze campus Sint-Hendrik with their AHA project.
In the first phase they needed to submit a short movie related to the weather in Utsteinen (where the PEA-station is located) in 2050. In the second phase they had to prepare a proposal for an educational project that they would like to undertake at PEA and present it in front of a professional jury.
As support, the IPF organized workshops in the Class Zero Emission educational centre, where polar scientists came to talk about their research, and members of the IPF education team lead hands-on learning activities. IPF also developed two teaching dossiers: polar sciences and meteorology.
Teacher visit the Princess Elisabeth Antarctic station
On December 15th, 2011 Koen Meirlaen left for Antarctica.He stayed at PEA for two months. He learnt more about the scientific research being conducted there and the systems that make PEA the first research station in Antarctica designed and built to run entirely on renewable energy.
By publishing movies, photos and interviews on his blog, Koen shared his experiences with his students at home. Koen also organized several Skype conferences so that he could offer other students the opportunity to ask questions and to compare the results of their experiments based on data he collected in Antarctica.
After the expedition
In the coming months, the IPF and Koen will collaborate in creating teaching dossiers, videos and pictures. These resources will be made available on EducaPoles. By offering free educational material in three languages (French, Dutch and English), we hope that this local project will have a global outreach.
Koen is sharing his Antarctic experience through talks to schools, local groups and at meetings of the teacher associations. Also, he received a lot of media attention before, during and after his expedition.
Isabelle Du Four, project manager of the Polar Quest project, gave a talk, as an invited speaker at the IPY 2012 Montreal meeting ‘From Knowledge to Action’ in the session ‘Inspiring the next generation: scientists in and out the classroom’ of Area 4 – Public Engagement, Education and Outreach.
We hope to continue this successful program and are looking for funding opportunities.
The AHA project
With AHA, Koen Meirlaen and his students want to encourage young people to take action to prevent global warming. They noticed how news on climate issues is mostly negative, and people had become used to this negativity. To counter this, the students want to create a scientific “AHA-experience” to inspire as many people as possible to take action.
AHA stands for Attention, Holistic, and Action. These three key words each stand for one of the three phases of the school project:
- Attention: to inform about climate change through events and talks
- Holistic: to translate the scientific research elaborated at the PEA-station to the class room and show the interest of it
- Action: Encourage everyone to take action by organizing events, talks amongst others by Peter Tom Jones, a climate debate with Belgian politicians and a contest for students
