At the end of every Digital WAVE session, we celebrate the students’ accomplishment with students, Museum staff, invited families and friends … and of course, chocolate cake! At our recent Family Event at the end of this year’s spring session, students presented the virtual world projects they’d created, which were designed to illustrate water pathways and the impacts of climate change on south Florida. Throughout the program, students gathered information for their projects through all kinds of fun activities. They went on a field trip to Anne Kolb Nature Center, met in-person with University of Miami scientist Dr. Arthur Mariano, met Dr. Annmarie Eldering of NASA via virtual worlds, conducted their own research, and built model aquifers. They even met virtually with students from Maloka Interactive Science Center in Colombia, who were also working on water and  climate related projects, through the Museum’s SCEnaRioS project. The final result was truly impressive, because not only did each group create south Florida environments like the Everglades or downtown Miami, but all of the groups worked together to make these environments fit in one interactive map of south Florida. All of the students received well-deserved certificates of completion, not to mention some yummy cake.

Dr. Annmarie Eldering works at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. She recently met with students in the Digital WAVE program, to tell them about her job and what inspired her to follow her career path. That career path has been pretty amazing, and students had soooo many questions. Dr. Eldering work involves extracting information about clouds, aerosols, and trace gases in the Earth’s atmosphere with satellites and remote sensing instruments. And she is the Deputy Project Scientist on the soon-to-be-launched Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO-2) satellite, which will map CO2 in the Earth’s atmosphere, basically “watching the Earth breathe.” And how did this awesome career path begin? It’s simple. An interest in chemistry and math, and wanting to know what stuff is made of.