Field Courses for Schools

We provide a series of ecology courses for groups of up to 40 students at the Dove Marine Laboratory. For a free brochure, please contact the Marine Education Officer:

Annie Cunningham
Marine Education Officer
Dove Marine Laboratory
School of Marine Science & Technology
Newcastle University
North Shields
Tyne and Wear
NE30 4PZ
Tel: 0191 2223059
Email: Annie.Cunningham@ncl.ac.uk

The Marine Environment as a Learning Resource

For Key Stage 1, 2 and 3 pupils there are exciting hands-on explorations of the rocky shore directly outside the laboratory, tackling concepts from the national curriculum such as Habitats, Adaptations of Organisms to their Environment, Feeding Relationships and Classification. Inside the lab itself, the hidden wonder of the marine environment is opened up through aquarium collections and microscope investigations of plankton.

GCSE and Post-16 Learning

We provide a range of half-day or day-long courses for GCSE, AS and A2 level students in Biology and Environmental Sciences. We also provide week-long packages that will cover different habitats and techniques. Accommodation can be arranged for groups travelling from afar. Why not base your A2 coursework at the Dove Marine Laboratory. We can get your pupils started with the basics of identification, sampling techniques, and those dreaded stats, before launching them off on their own explorations seeded with ecological project ideas that WILL WORK! Successful courses that we currently run are:

  • The factors affecting the distribution of organisms on a rocky shore.
  • The distribution of a rocky shore invertebrate or plant species with respect to a particular factor.
  • The communities of intertidal rockpools.
  • Population dynamics.
  • Predation studies.
  • Evolution, speciation and biodiversity.
  • The fauna of seaweeds.
  • Shell selection in Pagurus bernhardus.
  • Food preferences of marine molluscs.
  • Community succession on a rocky shore.
  • Patterns in populations.
  • Factors affecting the distribution of seaweeds.
  • Introduction to the zooplankton of the North Sea.
  • Sediment shore ecology.
  • Sand dune ecology (Most appropriate from May-September)
  • Marine pollution.
  • Mitosis and meiosis and recombination.
  • Fisheries and Marine Ecosystems.
  • Fisheries and Marine Production Systems.
  • Management of Marine Production Systems.

To see on overview of the modules relevant to each exercise, please consult the appropriate specification link: