Project: "FROST - Fieldwork instRuctionals fOr Students and Teachers"

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Authors: Daniel Kramer & Marius Jonassen

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Funding from iEarth: 49 505 NOK in 2020

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Every year it is the same. Our students at UNIS arrive in Longyearbyen in mid- to late-August and we have about two weeks to prepare them for the field. This includes a multiple day safety training from the logistics department, a couple of general lectures about the Arctic and scientific lectures on meteorology. Oh, and most of our students take the siste course on oceanography at the same time, so split our available time in two. All of a sudden, these two weeks sound awefully short. Did we forget something? Indeed! We expect our students to come up with a scientific plan for their fieldwork activity and, of course, how to handle different sensors that they want for their experiments... and we haven't even talked about them!

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In this project, we spend time developing additional teaching material for our students to better prepare them for their fieldwork and thereby enhance their learning outcomes. Our focus here was accessibility from home to give students the freedom to learn at their own pace.

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To prepare for the field itself, we created Virtual Field Trips. Here you can visit one of our field sites and have a look around and familiarise yourself with it. These are pictures taken with a drone and we stitched them together as 360° images. Another way to explore the localities are digital models of the surface. Here you can find one…looks familiar?

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The second part was to create videos about the instruments that we bring with us into the field. In these videos we discuss the principles of how they work, how we make sure they are running continuously and how to fix common problems. In the image on the side you can see a screenshot from one of the videos, showing two instructors discussing a weather station. The sensors are in the small sub-image on the left and in the background you can see software handling.

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Interested to learn more? Visit the iEarth project page. In the follow-up project, iWalk on FROST, we explored new ideas for teaching in the form of a series of small video games.

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ABSTRACT of the Seed Project FROST:

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The material is divided into two main parts, Virtual Field Trips (VFTs) and instructional videos. The goal of the VFTs is to familiarise the fieldwork participants (FPs) with the fieldwork area before going outside. VFTs consist of 360° pictures and Digital Surface Models (DSMs). The former shows the area as-is (reality) and the DSMs allows the user to move around virtually. The instructional videos explain in detail the instruments used during fieldwork. In the videos, we discuss the purpose of the instruments, how they work and the steps to deploy, maintain, and recover them. This allows fieldwork participants to prepare at their own pace.

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For more information on:

• how they produced the virtual field trips
• how to create an instructional video for an instrument

Please read the Seed Project report from the iEarth Educational publication series: FROST— Fieldwork instRuctionals fOr Students andTeachers

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In the Seed Project FROST the resulting learning material consists of

1. Virtual field guides from selected sites in Svalbard and
2. Instructional videos for handling of meteorological and oceanographic instruments.

The resulting material is relevant for several UNIS geophysics courses that conduct field work at these sites and or use this type of instrumentation, but it is also relevant to the iEarth mainland partners and institutions beyond.

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During the project, the students take an active part in both planning and execution of 1-2 weeks field work. This field work is arranged in the form of scientific cruises and field campaigns targeting different meteorological, oceanographical and glaciological themes and processes that the students subsequently write reports on.

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You can also check out the iWalk project, also an iEarth funded project, which is an expansion of the FROST project.

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Video and audio editing for tutorial videos (a video about the videos):

This video can also be downloaded here.

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