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Operation Montserrat

Posted on 31/03/2011

Humanities

As part of the Specialist School programme to provide more real-life learning experiences, Year 9 Geography students took part in a video conferencing event with the Nations Space centre in Leicester.
	They were given the task of becoming emergency response teams and saving the lives of the 8,000 residents of the Caribbean island of Montserrat. The mission was based on the real-life events of September 4th 1996 when the island was the world’s most dangerous place. Two potentially catastrophic events occurred; the eruption of the Soufriere Hills volcano and a Category 3 hurricane.
Working through a live video conferencing link with The National Space Centre the students were split into Hurricane, Volcano, Communications, Evacuation, Research and Media teams. Each team was given tasks by the Commanders from the Space Centre as well as receiving data through web links which they had to analyse to aid the evacuation team in deciding where to move the population safely. All this in 90 minutes! At first the teams calmly dealt with the information as it arrived, plotting the course of the hurricane and volcano, whilst the other teams started to move residents and research how they may be affected.
	All under the beady eyes of the media team. However as the mission developed a sense of urgency started to arise and the last fifteen minutes were frantic with concern for the safety of the people left in the capital city Plymouth. Over the course of the week five separate missions were undertaken by the different teaching groups in Year 9 and between them they successfully saved all but one of the residents of Montserrat.
Asked to evaluate how the e-mission helped their understanding of natural hazards and in what ways this was a positive learning experience the students said ‘…the panic and the stress felt almost real. It felt as if we were trying to save real lives and it helped me to realise the extremity of the situation much more than a normal lesson would have.’ ‘It was a positive learning experience because we were involved totally and it helped everyone to engage. I think we should have more learning experiences similar to this, as it was so interesting.’ ‘It taught me how to work as a team and think logically and quickly.’ It was fun, reinforced our lessons, gave different people a chance to work with others and made everyone more aware of how it affects people.’