Tours and Outreach

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The HWRL provides tours for the general public and K-12 student groups, Open Houses, and technical visits for researchers, the industry, and stakeholders. The laboratory tours have four specific goals for participants to increase their awareness of:

• Tsunamis and coastal hazards
• College preparedness
• Engineering career awareness
• Research and the research process

Tours include a 20 minute presentation focusing on the tour goals, a brief wave demonstration in our mini-flume and a guided tour of our facility. These tours typically last 45 minutes. Group size is limited to 20 to 25 participants maximum per tour and a maximum of 4 tours per day. Tours are conducted by appointment only.

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Education

Each 2-hour event included a tour of the HWRL facility, connection with engineering professionals, graduate, and undergraduate students conducting research at the facility, and a hands-on activity designed to engage students in the engineering process.

Students were able to witness how researchers from the University of Washington’s Applied Physics Laboratory are using infrared cameras and acoustics to analyze bubbles and foam of breaking waves as a way of understanding wave dissipation.

They were also able to watch researchers from OSU’s Robotics Decision Making Laboratory trial their robotic arm that could potentially be used to complete underwater tasks such as data and sample collection or trash removal.

Students also participated in a hands-on engineering design challenge that exposed them to coastal hazards facing the Oregon coast, including tsunami, tsunami debris, beach erosion, coastal flooding, and marine debris.

To emphasize that engineers work to solve problems to help people, the design challenge included an audience or user. For the challenge, student groups randomly selected their design, coastal hazard, and intended user cards.

Then, using household materials, students built mini-models that offered a potential solution to the coastal hazard and presented their model to their peers. For example, one group designed a structure made from human-made materials (design card) to combat coastal flooding (coastal hazard card) to help a coastal resident (user card).

HWRL staff and students were thrilled to have the opportunity to connect with youth participating in COE summer programming and look forward to many future collaborations!