It's that time of year again, where we welcome our student summer interns. This year we've taken on two engineers and one education intern who is co-designing and producing educational designs for our school program Network Blue. Meet the interns below and learn about the exciting projects they've started working on.
McKenzie:
McKenzie spent three years at the University of Adelaide
studying a Bachelor of Science with a major in geology, by the end of his
degree he quickly realised his passion for scientific education and
communication. Because of this, McKenzie applied for a Master of Teaching and
began study in 2021. “I heard about the Ed Tech Educational Designer intern
position that was being offered by AusOcean, and my interest was immediately
piqued.”
McKenzie’s main project with AusOcean involves the
development of the online e-learning materials that support AusOceans school
STEM program; Network Blue. Network Blue allows students to engage in projects
dealing with real world problems in ocean science, while learning about
environmental science, marine biology, ecology and even data science.
The internship position combines both of McKenzie’s main
academic interests; science and teaching. The internship role will enable
direct engagement with individual schools and their cohort of teachers and
students, providing skills that will become very useful for McKenzie’s degree, placements
and future as an educator. The development of the online learning materials
allows McKenzie to practice one of the most fundamental teaching skills, the
creation of engaging and meaningful lessons and instructional materials. In
addition to the education side of things, McKenzie was inspired to book in for
a PADI scuba diving course to get the most out of AusOcean maintenance and
deployment trips, which is something he likely never would have thought of
doing before the internship.
Russell:
Russell studied a Bachelor of Computer Science majoring in artificial intelligence at the University of Adelaide, and has plans to go back and complete his honours next year.
Russell is currently working on building a low-cost water clarity sensor using computer vision with hopes that this technology will also useful for calculating turbidity. This type of sensor would be beneficial for divers who are interested in visibility, or scientists monitoring changes in turbidity at sites over time. As a secondary project, he is also working on automatically sending sensor data to the AusOcean live streams.
He loves being able to use many of the skills he's learnt throughout his degree and apply them to helping our amazing oceans. He's eager to learn more about working on ambitious projects, and how he can apply his skills in innovative ways.
Alex:
Alex is at the University of Adelaide studying Electrical and Electronic Engineering, majoring in Cyber Security. During the summer internship their project is focused on the design of an accelerometer to measure wave height on our floating rigs. Alex is hoping to get more experience in practical engineering to pair with the more theoretical degree work.
We look forward to sharing their progress over the next few months.
AusOcean is a not-for-profit ocean research organisation that supports open source practices. Open source approaches to tackling environmental issues means embracing collaborative tools and workflows which enables processes and progress to be fully transparent. A critical aspect of working open is sharing data not only with your immediate team but with others across the world who can learn, adapt and contribute to collective research. By contributing to, and supporting open practices within the scientific community, we can accelerate research and encourage transparency. Check us out at https://www.ausocean.org
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