Oceanography advent calendar? Yes, please!

“Kitchen Oceanography” means doing simple experiments with household items and learning a lot about ocean physics along the way. The “24 days of kitchen oceanography” advent calendar is a perfect way to get involved! From December 1st, there will be daily experiments posted all throughout to the 24th — come over and join in the […]

#KitchenOceanography: Bringing physical oceanography into students’ homes

This is the longer version of the (A4!) poster that I presented on behalf of myself, Kjersti Daae, Elin Darelius, Joke Lübbecke and Torge Martin at the #FieldWorkFix conference last Tuesday (September 8, 2020). If you would rather listen to the voiceover than read the transcript below, please feel free to do that! (Thanks to Torge, the voice over […]

Using multiple rotating tables in undergraduate education — a field report

The affordable rotating LEGO tables that we’ve been using for the last year were developed by the DIYnamics Team. This is a repost of a guest post that I wrote for their blog: When we came across the DIYnamics article right after its publication, Torge and I (Mirjam) were very excited about the endless possibilities we saw opening up […]

Hands-on atmosphere & ocean dynamics in a comic? Now available in English!

When we started our “dry theory to juicy reality” project, our goal was to bring ocean and atmosphere dynamics to life and get students excited about investigating them in a rotating tank. Judging from all the feedback we got, this seems to have worked really well! Read Johanna Knauf’s comic for a student’s perception of […]

Alles andere als trockne Theorie: Unser Gastbeitrag bei PerLe

Über eine Lehrinnovation, die auf Kleingruppenarbeit und „hands-on“-Praxiselemente setzte – und was in Zeiten von Covid-19 daraus wurde. Hier ein Repost eines Beitrages, den wir für den “Einfach gute Lehre”-Blog geschrieben haben: In der Lehrveranstaltung „Atmosphären- und Ozeandynamik” im Bachelorstudiengang Physik des Erdsystems wird das theoretische Grundgerüst zum Verständnis der globalen Bewegung von Luft- und […]

When you dare say what everybody else is thinking…

Using “One should really play more!” as title of a presentation in a serious scientific colloquium might seem like a bold move, but the gamble payed off: a large, interested audience including everyone from students to professors enthusiastically dropped ice cubes and food dye in our LEGO-driven rotating tanks and passionately discussed their observations. On […]

12 students, four rotating tables, three experiments and one dog

Yesterday we had four rotating in operation simultaneously, running three different experiments. It’s pretty awesome to be able to bridge spin-up times by just observing what the teams on the neighboring tables are up to, also it’s nice to get a variety of experiments all happening at the same time. Very entertaining and educational indeed! […]

Not just for university teaching: Sharing our experiments with everybody!

Doing experiments like the ones we’ve been doing here is super helpful to let students of ocean and atmosphere sciences find a different way to approach highly theoretical rotating fluid dynamics. But the experiments are pretty and are raising curiosity not only in students, but in most people that see them. To share them with […]