Profile: Erica Moulton: Making Science Fun

Photos courtesy Erica Moulton

Above, "flying" ROVs is often a family activity with regional and national championships scheduled across the country. They can range from simple vehicles to complex underwater equipment like the machines that closed the BP oil rig. Above right, Erica with her husband Sean.

It's not often that skills a fifth-grader can master directly translate to the success of a deep-sea research mission – unless they're applied to building underwater ROVs, or remotely operated vehicles.

That's what makes teaching kids about ROVs so appealing to Erica Moulton, a St. Petersburg native and long-time environmental science teacher at Hillsborough Community College who is now faculty development and summer institute coordinator for the Marine Advanced Technology Education (MATE) Center in Monterey, CA.

"Kids can build an ROV from PVC pipe, a bilge pump and a 12-volt battery and fly it in a swimming pool," she says. "Then they want to install something to pick up a bottle on the bottom of the pool but they need more thrust and another motor so they need to learn more about physics and variable buoyancy."

In classrooms and competitions, students are encouraged to reuse everyday items on their ROVs, resulting in vehicles armored with forks tie-wrapped to thrusters so they can snatch a prize from the bottom of the pool. The same tools can be used on ocean-going research vessels.

"Most ROVs are customized for the mission they're on," she says. "But if you're on a research vessel looking at water quality, and scientists see a jellyfish they want to sample, you probably don't have a jellyfish-capturing apparatus on board. You'll head for the galley and check out the drawers to see what you can use."

And while the Department of Labor doesn't identify ROV technician as a top career opportunity, the need for qualified operators is growing. "ROVs are everywhere – law enforcement uses them to examine the underside of ships, companies like Tampa-based Odessey use them to search for underwater treasure, and they're in water cooling towers and gas pipelines looking for cracks."

Millions of people who may never have heard of an ROV watched intently as the unmanned submarines connected the pipes that eventually sealed the BP well that had been gushing oil into the Gulf of Mexico. "They can go deeper for longer – and they're much safer because their operators are working from the surface."

Even beyond job opportunities actually building or flying ROVs, teaching students about ROVs is a fun way to introduce them to science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education, Moulton said. "A lot of kids freak out when you start talking about science and engineering but ROVs are so fun, they're just hooked."
In fact, Moulton is a perfect example of how addictive ROVs can be. She was teaching environmental education
at HCC when she heard about MATE's classes on ROVs for teachers. "I applied and was accepted, and it changed my life."

The next step was a Tampa Bay Estuary Program mini-grant to build "ROVs in a bag" for distribution to teachers across the region, then a similar program funded through the Marine Technology Society's ROV committee that gives ROV kits to teachers around the world. Finally, Moulton accepted a job running the same program at the MATE Center that first hooked her on ROVs.

She works from her Crescent Lake home most of the year, then commutes to California for the summer to run the week-long ROV Institute for advanced teacher training. "I grew up in St. Petersburg and it's a great place to raise a family," she says.