One day a week, students at the Boys and Girls Club of the Lower Naugatuck Valley play oceanographer by performing water-based science projects or watching live ocean expeditions streaming over the Internet.
Tuesday, they got to meet the real thing: Robert Ballard, the man who discovered the wreckage of the R.M.S. Titanic.
Ballard toured the new Ansonia Boys and Girls Club with U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro Tuesday morning to see the students who participate in the Immersion Learning ocean education program he helped found and to talk to them about opportunities in the field.
“Your generation is going to explore more of earth than all previous generations combined,” Ballard told the group of students.
In a lively speech, Ballard talked about what it was like to see the Titanic on the ocean floor for the first and about the new technology that will allow anyone with internet access watch live ocean study streaming on the Internet 24 hours a day.
“You ain’t seen nothing yet,” Ballard joked.
Immersion Learning
The Immersion Learning program, which Ballard co-founded in 2002, is used in Boys and Girls Clubs and schools across the country. It aims to get students hooked to science by showing them the fun and mysterious side through underwater explorations.
Boys and Girls Club officials say the program helps students learn about new careers while improving their knowledge — and test scores — in science and math fields.
“The whole vision is to create a virtual experience,” said Katie Cubina, the vice president of Immersion Learning, who was also at the event Tuesday. “A couple of times a year we do the Web casts … They literally see what the ROV (remote operated vehicle) plots are seeing, right over their shoulder, like you’re eavesdropping.”
The experience is more than virtual for some students.
Some student ambassadors get to go on the real deep water dives with Ballard.
One local Boys and Girls Club member was chosen for the trip in 2005.
On the trip Jennifer DeLeon, 19, of Shelton, explored underwater volcanoes and other ocean environments off the coast of Greece.
“It was interesting,” DeLeon said. “Both (the trip and the Immersion Learning program) were exciting, and just fun-filled.”
Congressional Appeal
DeLauro also toured the Boys and Girls Club building Tuesday with Ballard. DeLauro has helped secure just under $500,000 to help renovate the building on Howard Avenue, said Jack Ribas, the executive director of the Boys and Girls Club of the Lower Naugatuck Valley.
“It was really run down,” DeLauro said of her last visit to the building, when she met with local leaders who wanted to renovate the building to expand the Boys and Girls Club activities to Ansonia. “There was such great commitment in that room about what could be done.”
DeLauro told the students they are the future.
“Along with outer space, which we hear so much about, our oceans are the last frontier,” DeLauro said. “I’m too old guys. This is your world and you’re going to take advantage of it.”
