The College of Exploration · Archive
ClassroomBATS
A project that put forty-three years of real ocean measurements into secondary classrooms, before most classrooms had a browser.
Why the line turns back
Sound travels faster through warm water, and faster again under pressure. Near the surface, temperature wins: the water cools sharply with depth and sound slows down. Below about a kilometre the water is nearly as cold as it will get, so temperature stops mattering and pressure takes over — and sound speeds up again.
Between the two is the slowest water in the ocean. Sound bends toward whatever is slower, so a noise made near that depth is refracted back into it from above and below instead of escaping. It becomes trapped in a horizontal channel and can travel for hundreds or thousands of kilometres.
The US Navy named it SOFAR, for sound fixing and ranging, and used it in the 1940s to locate downed airmen: drop a small charge, and listening stations far away could triangulate where it came from. Fin and blue whales appear to have been using it for rather longer.
Every point on that line is a real water sample from a single March morning in 1993. It was read out of OceanExplorer, the spreadsheet this project built for teachers in 1999, which has not been opened by its makers since. Drawing this used to take one button on a toolbar that no longer exists. The measurements behind it were never lost.
1999 · Archived
What this was
Classroom BATS began in 1999 and is no longer running. The site is archived: nothing on it has changed since, and none of it is maintained. It was funded by the National Science Foundation to help teachers use web-based ocean data in real curriculum. The College of Exploration built the website and the virtual campus together with the Bermuda Biological Station for Research, working with the College of Education at Florida International University.
Its sources were two time series, both still running today. Hydrostation S has been occupied southeast of Bermuda since June 1954, which makes it one of the longest continuous records of the open ocean anywhere. The Bermuda Atlantic Time-series Study added a second station further offshore in October 1988. The workbook held both, so a student in 1999 was working with measurements reaching back forty-three years — filtering them, extracting them, plotting them and arguing about them, using the same numbers the scientists used.
It was never only a website. Teachers enrolled in a virtual campus and worked as a cohort — the conference was called Bats_Fall99, and it ran the same term the data tool was finished. They were invited to submit lesson plans for review, adopt a link, crush a cup at depth, and compete in the BATS Bowl. The site was the shared repertoire of a working group.
BBSR is now the Bermuda Institute of Ocean Sciences, part of Arizona State University. Both time series are still sailing, each under its own NSF award: BATS reached cruise 428 in June 2025, and Hydrostation S has passed its seventieth year. The record now runs to seventy-two years. This file holds the first forty-three.
What still works, and what doesn't
The site has been online, untouched, for around twenty-five years. Some of it reads as well as it did. Some of it fails silently, which is worse than failing loudly. This is the honest inventory.
-
Works
The written lessons
Sound in the ocean, plant pigments, sea surface temperature, vertical migration and the rest are intact and still teach well. The SOFAR Channel lesson, with its garden hose and bucket of water, needs nothing but a teacher.
-
Works
Background, glossary and figures
Visualizing the data, the glossary, the technician and crew profiles, the Virtual Plankton Tow. Plain pages, plainly readable.
-
Degraded
The lesson plans
Written jointly by BATS scientists and FIU science teachers, and sound on the science. But they are aligned to the National Science Education Standards, which the Next Generation Science Standards superseded, and they predate the Ocean Literacy Framework entirely. Usable with translation.
-
Degraded
OceanExplorer, the data workbook
The measurements are all still in it — 5,183 BATS records and 11,168 from Hydrostation S. The interface is not. Every button lived on an Excel custom toolbar, a mechanism Microsoft retired in 2007, and macro-enabled files from the web are now blocked by default. The instructions describe menus that no longer exist.
-
Inert
The LessonPlanner
Teachers filled in a form and pressed Submit; a plain-text email reached the design team, who read every submission and vetted it before publishing. Browsers no longer send forms by email, and the address stopped receiving years ago. Pressing Submit today does nothing at all.
-
Inert
Joining the team
Crush a Cup, Adopt a Link, the BATS Bowl, Submit a Lesson Plan. The activities still read, and several would work tomorrow in any classroom with a polystyrene cup and a CTD rosette. But every route into the team ran through one mailbox at BBSR, and that mailbox is gone.
-
Inert
The Virtual Campus
Teachers met as a cohort in a Caucus conference at campus.coexploration.org/caucus/Bats_Fall99. Caucus stopped running long ago and the conference behind the login went with it. A successor campus is being built at that address.
-
Inert
Everything pointing at bbsr.edu
The guided tour, the Creature Feature, the BATS programme description and the partner links all resolve to an institution that has since been renamed twice. The pages they sat beside survive; the destinations do not. The project mailbox, cbats@bbsr.edu, went with them — which is why the address at the foot of this page is the same name on a domain that will not be reorganised.
What is still in the file
The workbook was saved in August 1999 and has not been opened by its makers since. Reading it directly, without Excel, this is what it holds.
Oct 1988 – Jan 1997
Jun 1954 – Nov 1997
471 months sampled
in the record
absent, against 1% of
temperature values
That last figure is not a flaw. Which instruments ran on which cruise, and why some measurements began later than others, is a real question about how science actually gets done — and it is the kind of question a cleaned teaching dataset can never raise.
Bringing it to 2026
We are seeking support to rebuild Classroom BATS as something that runs in a browser on a school Chromebook, reads the live BATS record rather than a frozen slice of it, and carries alignments to the Next Generation Science Standards and the Ocean Literacy Framework.
The most interesting part is the piece that broke first. Everything teachers could contribute — a lesson, a link, a cup crushed at 4,000 metres — arrived as email at one address, and was read and judged by hand. The 1999 team vetted every submission for content accuracy, grade-level appropriateness and pedagogical merit until they dispersed, and the community stopped when the reviewing did. Expert judgement was the bottleneck, and it was also the thing that made the work good. Whether that can be reopened without losing what made it worth doing is a question worth funding.
If you are a funder, a district, a researcher, or you taught with this in the first place, we would like to hear from you: cbats@coexploration.net