EWOC Conference Write Up: Day 1 Monday 3rd July 2006.

Arriving finally at my place of residence at 2am following a real planes, trains and automobiles (well shuttle bus) experience. I eventually found my way to the University of Colorado Williams Village Residence Hall. After a couple of hours of sleep it was time to get up again and head down to breakfast with my new room mate Professor Ricardo J. Morales De Jesús from the University of Puerto Rico.

The bus picked up at 07.30am to take us to the Conference venue at UCAR and the conference kicked off at 08.30h. The conference program was interesting as most presentations lasted only 15 – 30 minutes, with time for a couple of questions. The topics were short and snappy and made high use of audio visual material. Not all of the presentations were relevant to me and I have to admit some of the science involved went a little over my head.

The main things that I took from the conference on Monday was the educational information on Hurricanes. As I mentioned in a previous post I was particularly impressed with the Hurricane Strike Resource. It’s important to remember that this resource gets up-dated each year, so keep remembering to download an up-to-date version. I also picked up a DVD from John Kermond showing all of the 2005 Hurricanes as a visualisation. The DVD takes a close look at all the 2005 Hurricanes, with a special emphasis on Hurricane Katrina. The links to NASA on the 2005 Hurricanes were also particularly useful, including this .mov file of the 2005 hurricanes.

LESSON STARTER IDEA:‘Watch the following animation. How many hurricanes were there? And what do you notice about the names of the hurricanes?’

I also picked up some good links to Tsunami Resources in particular NOAA Tsunami Ready Education Page. One of the things that I like about this resource is that it provides information on Tsunamis that occurred prior to the recent Indonesian Tsunami. It also has some nice animations on how Tsunamis can occur due to land slides and pyroclastic flows.

The rest of the morning was spent looking at presentations from museums, exhibitions and community science programmes. All very interesting and emphasising the point that to create excellent education resources you need a strong partnership between teachers, designers and scientists.

In the afternoon I headed back to the Boulder Outlook Hotel where George Meldrum and Victoria Aldridge (more on this pair later) were staying to finalise our presentation and stick our poster together ready for Tuesday’s poster presentation. I had bought our 8ft by 4ft poster to the USA in over 50 pieces that Microsoft publisher had kindly printed out for me. Putting it together and making it fit proved to be a mammoth task lasting several hours.

The final product did look fantastic and it was worth the effort. We rewarded ourselves with a couple of pints of Fat Tire the local brew!

The Boulder Outlook Hotel was Boulders first zero waste hotel. Wouldn’t it be great to have zero waste schools?