When you're an oceanographer, you can't go to the corner store and buy the equipment you need. Each piece needs to be custom-designed to suit the needs of the project, and withstand changing pressure, saltwater corrosion, and more. Students learned all about the challenges of ocean engineering and solutions that HMSC's Innovation Lab work on daily.

They also got to try their hand at building ROVs. They built an aerodynamic frame out of PVC pipes, used a trial and error process to achieve neutral buoyancy, and finally used a remote control to direct their ROV to retrieve silverware scattered at the bottom of the tank.

Students conducted a cognitive psychology experiment within the Hatfield Visitor’s Center. This experiment asked visitors to sort index cards with different vocabulary words into groups, creating a mental model about a particular concept. This creates a visual model of how people see relationships between words, allowing scientists to study how people understand, learn, reason, predict, and eventually make decisions. By surveying participants who are either very familiar or new to Hatfield’s exhibits, we can even see how the Visitor Center impacts the way people understand these concepts!

Two teams of student researchers chose to examine how visitors conceptualize the ideas of “tsunamis” and “the deep sea”. 

Would we really be the H2O Research Team if we didn't get out on the water? After a sunny departure from Depoe Bay harbor, our group braved foggy and choppy offshore conditions in search of gray whales. We were incredibly lucky to get an up-close look at a large female feeding offshore. Whales are important to the local ecosystem, native cultures, and tourism industry in the area.