NOAA’s Chesapeake Exploration is a new and innovative collection of online activities for middle and high school students that bring the science of the Chesapeake Bay to life. Chesapeake Exploration gives teachers and their students unprecedented access to lessons designed around real-time observational data from CBIBS.

Inside a virtual classroom, Chesapeake Exploration guides students through an engaging investigative process that explores natural and human systems and cycles and the ways in which they interact throughout the Bay and its watershed.

• Students can query observational platforms throughout the Bay from their classroom or home.
• Students can use National Geographic's Fieldscope to investigate the natural and human systems in the Bay's watershed and answer geospatial questions.
• Students can populate "dynamic worksheets" that ask them to think through scientific principles related to water quality and weather phenomena using current observation data.
• Teachers can create a unique online environment for their classrooms, including locking parameters such as date/time so all students use the same data sets and storing student answers online for easy grading.

Chesapeake Exploration, developed in partnership with National Geographic and the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, provides an exciting opportunity to further explore the concepts introduced by the NOAA Estuaries 101 curriculum. The Chesapeake Exploration curriculum will be available to teachers and students starting spring 2012. More information on Chesapeake Exploration is available from the NOAA Chesapeake Bay Office.