As a former teacher, I’m always on the hunt for ways to take advantage of things kids like in order to increase engagement. If educators can repurpose real-world contexts to make subjects like math and science seem more appealing, we definitely should! Kid’s passions are important, and our curriculum should help foster those passions as well as teach what they need to know.

Thankfully, the list of things teachers can use in their curriculum now includes sharks, in the form of a site known as Ocearch.

Ocearch describes itself as “a non-profit organization with a global reach for unprecedented research on great white sharks and other large apex predators.” In layman’s terms, it’s a group that has been tracking and researching ocean predators like sharks in order to learn more about them. As the team encounters a tagged shark, they update the site with their location in real time, allowing the users of the site to follow a shark as it travels around the world. I’ve been using this site to follow shark sightings on the eastern seaboard; as of this post, a shark named Mary Lee was sighted just a few miles from where I am typing this sentence!

The tracker puts recent ‘pings’ onto a world map, which students can click on to see recent sightings of sharks and other oceanic creatures. Clicking on a ‘ping’ will pull up more information about the animal, including where else it has been. Students can also pull up ‘paths’, connecting pings together to see a shark’s travel path through the ocean.

 So what does this mean for educators?

First, it’s an opening to show kids real sharks, paired with the science behind the science of locating, tracking, and understanding sharks.

The site knows their appeal for students, and their introduction to the science of shark tracking is clear and concise, easy for even beginning students to grasp. The group has also provided material accordingly: right on the site, Ocearch provides material for Oceanography, Biology, Physics, Math, and Chemistry curriculum that can be used alongside the Shark Tracker. The lessons plans, materials, and practice problems provided are appropriate up to 8th grade, and include an in-depth practical use of the site’s Shark Tracker. Using Ocearch, students can study the biology of sharks based on their preferred swimming paths, calculate their vectors and populations, and discuss the impact of oceanic pollution on their favored habitats.

As a research platform, Ocearch is a deep, rich opening into the world of marine biology. As an educational tool, it can provide a startling look at a part of science curriculum that often doesn’t get much attention, putting sharks into a context your students can reach (in some cases, even literally!) Any school with a Marine Science or Oceanography course, or even any class that needs some new variety to their curriculum, should definitely consider browsing the materials this research group has to offer. And if anyone else is as interested in sharks as I am…Cate is slated to be in Long Island by tonight. Feel free to join me in tracking her progress!