Learning That Lives Outside the Classroom

Students design, build, wire, and pilot an underwater remotely operated vehicle, then send it to explore the seafloor and pier pilings right here in Tillamook Bay. The electronics are real: batteries, motors, electromagnets, and soldered waterproof circuits.

Salmon runs on the Oregon Coast are one of the great natural events of the year. This program puts students right in the middle of it, covering life history, migration science, water chemistry, river hydrology, a full dissection, and culinary aspects.

The best way to understand a bay is to get out on it. Students paddle Tillamook Bay or one of the surrounding waterways and learn its natural history from the water. Options include Tillamook Bay, Netarts Bay, Nehalem Bay, Hoquarton Slough, and Lake Lytle.

Pull a Dungeness crab from the bay, study its behavior and life history, and explore one of the richest crabbing grounds on the coast.

Wade into the mudflats at low tide, dig your own clams, and trace them from the bay to the table. Students explore clam behavior and life history, learn about invasive species, conduct plankton exploration, complete a clam dissection, and discover the deep culinary roots of clamming on the Tillamook Coast.

The rocks along this coastline have a story to tell. Students learn the geologic history of the Oregon Coast, visit local sites to observe landforms firsthand, collect rock samples, and bring them back to the Boathouse to cut and polish. Every student cuts a thunderegg and works with a sunstone.

Compare the pros and cons of every major energy source, then build with them. Students construct a solar boat, design a wind machine, and build a tidal generator, connecting each to the real forces at work on Tillamook Bay.

Where does electricity actually come from? Students find out by building it. They trace the origin of energy, construct wet and dry cell batteries, design circuits, make electromagnets, and build a working motor or generator. The program wraps with a take-home electronics project.

Where does ocean trash come from, and what can we actually do about it? Students investigate the origins and makeup of beach debris, collect and categorize what they find on the beach, and screen sand for microplastics, including the nurdles used in plastic manufacturing.

Step into a coastal forest and discover the ecosystem living overhead and underfoot. Students identify and measure trees, take increment bores to read a tree's growth history, calculate timber volumes, and explore how climate, fire, and disease shape forest stands over time.

Sea stars, sea urchins, sand dollars, sea cucumbers. Four animals that look nothing alike and have more in common than you might expect. Students explore live tank specimens, study behaviors and life histories across all four groups, and complete a comparative dissection.

Students learn the techniques used to fish the bottom, water column, and surface of Tillamook Bay, study the behavior and life histories of local fish species, complete a fish dissection, and participate in citizen science through measured catch data. An engineering activity on air bladders and buoyancy rounds out the day.

A broad, hands-on introduction to life in the bay. Students explore multiple invertebrate groups through the tidepool tanks, investigate plankton, complete a pile worm dissection, and build food chains and food webs. A good starting point for groups new to marine science, and rich enough for groups that are not.

Navigate the site of a town swallowed by the sea. Students use a compass and a GPS to locate buildings from the famously doomed town of Bayocean, working from historical writings to piece together their own map of what once stood there.

Snails, limpets, chitons, sea slugs, clams. All of them live in our tidepool tanks year-round, and every one of them is more interesting than it looks. Students examine behaviors and life histories across each group, take part in citizen science on the rocky shore, and complete a squid dissection.

Anemones, jellyfish, and polyps have been thriving in these waters for a very long time. Students explore all three major cnidarian groups through live tidepool tank specimens, complete a sea anemone dissection, conduct a plankton tow, and work through an engineering activity on salinity and buoyancy.

Kelp forests, eelgrass meadows, native versus invasive species. This program explores the underwater world that holds the whole bay together. Students examine, draw, and identify local seaweed species and take a close look at what separates native from invasive eelgrass communities.

Temperature, oxygen, salinity, alkalinity, pH. These are the invisible forces that shape what can live in Tillamook Bay and what cannot. Students investigate how these factors interact, explore seasonal currents, and examine ocean acidification and the role marine organisms play in a changing climate.