EDUCATION:
“In a time when our focus on the environment and climate change is at an all time high, we need to develop a new generation of young people who have the curiosity and imagination to tackle the challenges ahead.”
Vision is the primary human sense – we are creatures of ‘light’. Yet the majority of the planet’s inhabitants are creatures of ‘sound’. Equipping students with a unique listening device like the DolphinEar DE200 allows them to discover a new world for themselves. It gives them first hand knowledge, stimulates the amazement of discovery, and develops the curiosity and imagination that is necessary if they are to excel in their chosen careers.
Here are just a few examples of how DolphinEar hydrophones have been used in various educational systems:
JUNIOR & SENIOR SCHOOLS (K-12)
DolphinEAR can be used in a wide variety of Educational Programs and Activities:
FIELD TRIPS: Introduce students to the world of underwater ‘bio-acoustics’, How does a frog sound underwater? Do they make sounds while swimming? Monitor sound activity in ponds, lakes, rivers and estuaries. What does a swan sound like when swimming? Or when it lands clumsily on the water? Can you hear fish munching on weeds at the bottom of the river?
ECOLOGY COURSES: Listen as the ice moves and groans on frozen lakes in winter. Can you hear the trapped bubbles of air in the ice being released as it melts? Put an ice cube on the DolphinEar hydrophone and see if it sounds like the frozen lake in winter. Or put it into your favourite fizzy soft drink and listen to the bubbles of CO2 being released. What sort of spectrum can you see on the spectrogram software? Try the same experiment with water and an ice cube. Can you see a difference?
PHYSICS DEMONSTRATIONS: Measure speed of sound in various mediums – gas, liquids and solids. For example, one science class was given the assignment to determine the speed of sound in water compared to the speed of sound in air. They set up a DolphinEar and an ordinary air microphone at one end of the pool and fed them into a digital stereo recorder. At the other end of the pool stood a student with a big paddle. When directed the student hit the water surface hard with the paddle. The sound travelled both through the air and through the water. Retiring to their classroom, they downloaded the audio file from their digital recorder, and use the spectrogram software that comes with all DolphinEar hydrophones to measure the time difference of the sudden paddle splash. Since the knew the length of the pool, they were able to determine the difference in speed for sound travelling through air and water.
SCIENCE FAIRS: Compare ‘whistle signatures’ of dolphin species, individual animals or groups.
SCIENCE PROJECTS, SCIENCE FAIRS, HOME SCHOOLING
Bring underwater sound into your home schooling curriculum. Practical experience is the essence of learning in any environment. Discover unknown worlds – open up the subjects of biology, physics, chemistry and the environment. DolphinEar hydrophones are not just for the water environment either. They can be used in the ground to detect the sounds of burrowing animals; they can be frozen in an icy lake to listen to the sounds of a spring thaw; they can be attached to a tree to pick up the sounds of a forest in motion, or to a wall to monitor building sounds. Because DolphinEar works in water, ground and air its use is governed by your imagination. And, when combined with the free spectrogram software that comes with every DolphinEar, it becomes a power analytical tool that will impress.
UNIVERSITY & Post Graduate Work
Sound opens new areas of research that have been largely ignored in recent times. DolphinEar hydrophones have played an important role in the development pf new low cost, non-invasive measurement techniques for medical and environmental research. DolphinEar is also found in underwater robotic labs around the world. And, as you would expect it has been a favourite tool for marine biologists and university post grads because of its reliability and simplicity.
