Session 10 — What Have We Learned? What’s Next?

Session 10 — What Have We Learned? What’s Next?#

Format D — Science Communication Workshop Week 10 Relevance: Synthesis · Capstone · Field identity

3-minute capstone elevator pitches · Peer review · Closing the loop

Hook (0 – 5 min)

Open with: “Ten weeks ago, I showed you a seismogram and asked what it was. Let’s look at it again.”

Re-show the Tōhoku visualization from Session 1. Ask: “What do you see now that you didn’t see then?”

2 minutes of responses — this is both a diagnostic and a celebration of learning.

Capstone elevator pitches (5 – 42 min)

Each student delivers a 3-minute capstone elevator pitch covering:

  1. What problem did you investigate?

  2. What geophysical method did you use?

  3. What did you find?

  4. Why should anyone outside this room care?

Peers review using the rubric students designed and refined across the quarter. After each pitch, one peer gives structured feedback using the rubric criteria.

Debrief: What made the strongest pitches work? What was hardest to communicate clearly?

Closing conversation (42 – 50 min)

Three questions to close the quarter:

  1. What geophysical question do you now want to answer that you didn’t know existed 10 weeks ago?

  2. Which of the five skill threads (geophysics content, Python/computing, reproducibility, technical writing, AI literacy) surprised you most?

  3. What is one thing you plan to do differently in the next course or lab because of what you learned here?

The instructor does not answer these questions — students do.

Relevance

Synthesis: The capstone pitch distills the arc of the entire course: from waves and snell’s law to gravity to earth interior to inversion — all methods in service of understanding a real problem.

Identity: Students who can state “I work on [problem] using [method] because [reason]” have crossed from student to scientist-in-training. The 3-minute pitch is the first time many of them will have done this out loud.

Forward: The “go deeper” pointer this week is the student’s own next step — the one question they most want to chase.

Go Deeper

This week’s pointer is yours to write. What question came up this quarter that you still want to answer?

Resource: EarthScope Consortium — open data, open code, open education. The entire infrastructure for the next generation of geophysical research.