AXA XL Arctic Live is a unique education event linking student with scientists exploring the frozen north from 1-8 May, 2019.
Students around the world will be able to the join the AXA XL Arctic Live research team who are investigating marine plastics and ocean acidification. The science team from the University of Exeter and Plymouth Marine Laboratory will be based at the NERC Arctic Research Station in the northernmost permanent community in the world, Ny Alesund, on the Svalbard archipelago. Schools can sign up for a range of live broadcasts here.
The Arctic is changing rapidly. It is experiencing the highest levels of warming of any region on the planet, and the chemistry of the Arctic Ocean is acidifying more rapidly now, than at any time in the past 300 million years. Arctic Live offers the chance for young people to explore the issues and put into context news headlines about climate change.
The broadcast sessions will run from the 1st to the 8th May. Classes and families will be able to interview the scientists and members of the expedition team, take part in Ask-me-anything sessions, and join the experiments explaining some of the changes occurring in the Arctic.
Activities range from interviews with experts to live investigations and Arctic Q&A sessions. Each broadcast has a host of supporting resources from activities and lesson plans to galleries and virtual reality content here. You can view all the planned sessions and sign up here.
You can also follow the event on Twitter by following Encounter Edu and you can use the #ArcticLive to see updates.
Polar Exploration from LGfL would be a fantastic resource to use alongside this event. LGfL worked with the Scott Polar Research Institute at Cambridge University in creating this comprehensive resource, which provides a unique insight into the 'Heroic Age of Scientific Discovery'.
Featuring exclusive access to the historic archive of the most famous polar expeditions of the 20th Century, the resource includes:
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- Video footage of equipment and artefacts from the most famous expeditions, complete with text transcripts of the expert explanations
- High-resolution photographs of objects featured in the video footage
- Journal extracts read by a descendant of a member of Captain Scott's Discovery expedition
- Interactive map of the Polar Regions with plotted locations of the multimedia assets
- The opportunity to meet a modern-day polar explorer and hear of his experiences living for extended periods of time in some of the world's most extreme environments.
- A wide range of learning materials to support KS2, KS3 and KS4
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The video below provides a case study of how Exning Primary schools made use of a range of technologies to support enhanced learner outcomes using the Polar exploration resource for their topic based work.
BusyThings also have a range of resources linked to the Arctic and Polar that could also be used to support your work during Arctic Live. Children can label the Arctic habitat and then after watching one of the live sessions could use the information gathered to write an Arctic fact file using the template in Busythings.
If you do use any LGfL content in your school to inspire your students do let us know by posting them on LGfL’s twitter or Facebook pages.