OTREC-Nuquí team: Education and Outreach activities!

On Aug 8th and 9th, the OTREC-Nuquí team visited the only school in Nuquí for our education and outreach activities.  The school is called Institución Educativa Ecoturistica Litoral Pacifico, Nuqui – Choco, Colombia, which holds classes for both elementary and high school students.  First, we asked the school’s principal for permission to show the students what OTREC was and the various elements that brought us to Nuquí.  The principal loved it so much that suggested to present the activity to the whole school, from preschool to 11th grade.  However, there was only one room in the school with audio visual aids, limiting the presentation to one grade at the time.  The visual aids room was hot and humid, but half a dozen fans hanging in the wall kept the room somehow fresh.  Since our time was somehow limited, we only presented OTREC to 4-7 graders.

We introduced ourselves to the kids, described OTREC and its objectives, and highlighted the broad impact to the local community and the region. We followed our talk by showing the global rainfall map (i.e., according to TRMM), which highlights the Nuquí area as one of the rainiest spots on Earth.  We anticipated that communicating with such young audience --and keeping their attention-- was going to be challenging.  Hence, we used plain language and made colorful-cartoonish slides.  Additionally, we made the presentation rather informal and kept asked the kids many basic trivia questions about rainfall, including its temporal variability --seasonality, diurnal cycle--, how rainfall forms, where lightning comes from, and how rainfall (or lack thereof) affects them.  To our surprise, students were very engaged and their knowledge about their environment was rich.  After all, they live in one of the rainiest spots on earth.

We invited students to visit our launching site. The idea was to show them the process of inflating the balloon, the pieces of equipment necessary to perform upper-air observations, and observation readouts and plots.  We were very pleased to have many kids showing up.  Kids were amazed when they saw the balloon inflation process. And after some safety tips were given, a couple of them got their chance to launch a sounding.  Of note is that such exposure to the launching site just made them more curious.  Now, kids were full of questions and eager to learn.   The most common questions included:  were the balloon and sounding eventually be recovered? How high does the balloon go? What happens if it goes into a cloud or rain?

Despite our relatively poor skills to communicate with kids, it was a fulfilling education and outreach experience.