This semester zoology and biology students were involved in an immersion learning class with the Fort Wayne Children's Zoo to create videos for displays and do research that benefited the zoo.
Professor of Biology Gary Dodson said the immersion project was aimed at helping students become involved and learning how zoos work. The project involved students dividing themselves in three groups to focus on different aspects of the zoo.
Students had a lot of ideas to help the zoo when they began the project that couldn't work because of how the zoos operated, Dodson said.
"The realities of the real world are often shielded from the academic world," he said.
Working at the zoo offered students the immersive learning that couldn't be offered in the classroom.
It's "the school of hard knocks," Dodson said. "Problems are OK. Problems are all a part of the process."
One group of students made an informational video about feeding jellyfish. They said they would take three cameras to the zoo and shoot the jellyfish for the day.
Senior biology major Devin Baier said the challenge was that zoo keepers have to feed each of the 150 jellyfish with a syringe, and it could take about three hours to do.
Junior zoology major Rob Bragg said working at the zoo was more of a challenge because there were a lot of politics and administrators that complicated the groups' initial ideas.
Also, the semester was not enough time to do what the students wanted because it didn't give them enough time to work, he said.
One of the ideas they had was to have a virtual field trip with Ball State University and the zoo, he said, but they didn't have enough time to do it so they had to drop the idea.
They couldn't sit around and be disappointed for two or three weeks, Bragg said, so they had to go into action.
He said it was well worth the time the students put into the project, and he got more experience than he expected when he went into the project.
The zoo enjoyed the one-minute-and-15-second video, and it would integrate the video into the display, he said.
Baier said he learned a lot about the technologies because he wasn't very technical. But he said it was in the spirit of the immersion project because they had to "learn [their] way out of it."
Dodson said Wednesday was a beautiful day to end the course and take a walk through the zoo.
"We needed that closure for all the work that was put in," he said.
Dodson said the class was a good experience for him, but there was a lot to be learned from immersion because they were unsure of the class's future.
"We don't know where immersion is going to go," he said.
Dodson said he was not sure if the class was scheduled for next year, but thought it was successful and would happen again.
"I think there would be an awfully good chance we would do it again," he said.
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