2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

The Ocean Remote Sensing Program (ORSP) seeks to engage grade 9-12 and undergraduate students in ocean engineering skills to support Maine’s ocean industries. The Gulf of Maine is recognized as one of the world’s fastest warming bodies of water causing a sea change of challenges to Maine’s coastal aquaculture industries and local communities. The increasing coastal water temperatures disrupt local marine ecosystems and alters coastal currents. These evolving challenges are increasing the complexity of grow and harvest operations necessitating improved coastal water monitoring programs to deliver real-time, hyper-local data to inform business decisions and improve science initiatives. Simultaneously, demand for ocean and marine engineers to develop and maintain new technologies in aquaculture, sea floor mining, offshore energy, transportation and ocean science is outpacing current graduation rates. In this work, we detail the methods and outcomes of the ORSP program and highlight the engineering outcomes of a team of eleven engineering student participants. The program participants include STEM-track undergraduate and high school interns tasked with the development, design and deployment of low-cost ocean drifter buoys. This experiential program seeks to address workforce development preparedness needs while enabling real-time water quality data to support local aquaculture industries in Maine. Participants are provided learning opportunities in manufacturing, electronics, programming, computer-aided design and the engineering design process. The drifters developed herein use low-cost Arduino-based microcontrollers and sensors to allow the acquisition of latitude, longitude, drift rate, drift direction, sub-surface temperature, turbidity and dissolved oxygen searchable by aquaculture companies in the region. Students participating in the project were surveyed to quantitate their engineering skills development and future interest in ocean engineering careers. The program successfully demonstrates improvement in ocean industry awareness, ocean engineering mission planning and ocean hardware operation and electronics.