Lesson 39

Card 5.4: The Argo Program

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Format: Socratic seminar + data touch

Time: 40 min

Prerequisites: Card 1.3 strongly recommended

Core Question

Around four thousand robotic floats are drifting through the world’s oceans right now, diving and surfacing on a schedule, and they have quietly become one of the most important climate instruments humanity owns. Our float is a working model of one. What do they measure and why does it matter?

Resource (before seminar, ~10 min)

Read the provided Argo program overview. Note: the dive cycle (drift deep, profile up, transmit at surface), what is measured (temperature, salinity, pressure), and one finding Argo data made possible (ocean heat content trends).

Activity (in class, 10 min)

Real data touch: open the provided CSV of one real Argo float profile and plot temperature versus depth using your Card 4.4 skills (or read the pre-made plot if you have not cleared 4.4). Write one sentence about what the thermocline looks like in the data.

Prep Notes (your artifact)

The dive cycle in your own words, mapped step by step onto what Ebirah does.
One claim: what is the most important thing Argo tells us, and why do you say so?
One honest question.

Clearing This Card

Prep notes plus the data sentence plus seminar participation.

If You Miss This Class

All materials on the class page; prep notes, data sentence, and the written seminar response.

Why This Matters

This is the float’s WHY, and the engineering presentation scores WHY heavily. A student who can go from a real Argo profile to Ebirah’s dive cycle to the piston mechanism owns the full story judges want.