News

Fresh Eyes on Ice team members Christi Buffington and Maya Kurkhill and our partners from the Alaska Satellite Facility Tony Hayba and Jade Brown had the pleasure of engaging the community of Utqiagvik in Fresh Eyes on Ice "Drones on Ice" activities at the annual Barrow Arctic Research Center Science fair, August 10-13. The BARC Science Fair is run by the UIC Science, a business unit of the Ukpeaġvik Iñupiat Corporation thst provides support to researchers from around the world working out of Utqiagvik, Alaska.

Notes and photos from their adventures:

Monday, August 10: We presented to 24 people at the BARC science center during an evening public science talk. During the talk, we shared what Fresh Eyes on Ice is, how citizen scientists can contribute fall, winter and spring photos of freshwater ice, and how we use the data. View the community presentation here: 2026 BARC Presentation

Christi Buffington and team presented on how to be involved in Fresh Eyes on Ice in Utqiagvik using the GLOBE Observer app. Photo by T. Curry.

Objective 3. Continue to use citizen science data to inform public safety for river ice travel and ice jam flooding;

• Over two days, we conducted "Drones on Ice activities" with 57 youth in four separate age groups, plus parents and guardians for pre-school age youth. Our focus for the learning activities was to give the students experience building and flying drones, understanding the palce of drones between the satellite data collected about ice and the ground observations of ice, including GLOBE photos for Fresh Eyes on Ice linked to remote sensing of ice. 
• On Tuesday, August 11, we had the kids building mini-drones and designing (on paper) a payload on the drone and consider how to conduct remote sensing to get the payload from point A to point B. 

On Wednesday, August 13, we taught the kids drone safety,  how to flying drones through an indoor obstacle course. We had the older kids complete an engineering design challenge to follow up on thier drone payload design, and for the youngest kids we had a “build a satellite” craft. 

Fun and STEM learning was had by all!