Lesson 40

Card 5.5: Monterey Bay, Our Sanctuary

New to lesson cards? See what a lesson card is.

Format: Socratic seminar

Time: 40 min

Prerequisites: Card 0.1

Core Question

Our regional competition happens beside a national marine sanctuary with a submarine canyon deeper than the Grand Canyon and a world-famous research institution on its shore. What makes this bay worth protecting, and what does “protected” actually permit and forbid?

Resource (before seminar, ~10 min)

Read the provided sanctuary overview. Note the canyon, the kelp forest ecosystem, one protected activity conflict (fishing, cables, discharge), and what MBARI does there with vehicles related to ours.

Prep Notes (your artifact)

One claim about the hardest tradeoff a sanctuary must manage, with reasoning.
One connection between something our robot does and work actually done in the bay.
One honest question.

Seminar Threads

Who gets a say in what happens in a sanctuary: fishers, scientists, tourists, the Navy? Does research technology belong in protected water? If our team could run one real mission in the bay, what should it be?

Clearing This Card

Prep notes plus participation, as in Card 0.1.

If You Miss This Class

Materials on the class page; prep notes plus written seminar response.

Why This Matters

This is local knowledge about the water our regional lives beside, and it converts directly into presentation context: teams that connect their vehicle to their own coastline stand out from teams reciting generic ocean facts.