2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

This paper builds on a prior ASEE-SE contribution [1] which described implementation of SeaPerch and SeaGlide [2] into University-hosted robotics summer camps intended for middle and high school aged students respectively. An observation from the 2022 camp offerings was students’ reluctance to participate in an activity viewed as a competition. In parallel, a University alumni, currently employed by the surrounding County, was pursuing opportunities to leverage maritime robotics in citizen science based efforts to assess success of reintroduction of freshwater mussels into rivers and streams in the County. With this backdrop, a collaboration was formed in which the County provided middle school aged campers an introduction to the scientific needs for freshwater mussel surveying, and in lieu of a final competition, the middle schoolers were tasked with showcasing how the SeaPerches they designed and built could be utilized for conducting freshwater mussel surveys. This paper provides a brief overview of the camp structure documented comprehensively in [1], followed by discussion of the scientific tasking provided to the campers, and observations on student engagement leveraging this citizen science emphasis.