The Liepaja Municipal Education Department Science and Education Innovation Center (ZIIC) has unveiled the most time-consuming and engineering-technically complex result of the European Economic Area and Norway (EEA/N) project “Development of the Innovation Center in the Liepaja city” in Lake Liepaja – a small-sized navigational vehicle for natural cognition research, which will henceforth be known to the public as Watercraft “AkvaLab Liepāja”.
The name of the watercraft is formed from a compound – the Latin word “akva” with the meaning “water” and “laboratorium” with the meaning “laboratory”, which together form the word “water laboratory”, while the place name “Liepāja” is included in the name to promote the recognition of the location of the watercraft in the national and at the international level.
“The watercraft is intended only for educational purposes and scientific research activities and can also be considered as an educational innovation for the achievement of general educational goals. In the future, students and teachers will be able to carry out the lessons of subjects such as “Natural Sciences” and “Biology” on the Watercraft, in addition, educators in the fields of mathematics and technology will also find related topics to learn,” emphasizes Kitija Kuduma, Acting Deputy Head of the Education Department. “On a daily basis, for example, we will collect samples of water and the organisms in it – zooplankton, phytoplankton, benthos – with such water research tools as a plankton net, bathometer, scraper, seki disc and others, and we will also carry out such physicochemical measurements of water transparency, pH level , using a pH meter probe, oxygen and other measurements, but we will return all the obtained aquatic organisms back to the Liepāja lake without causing them any harm,” adds Sniedze Više, an environmental expert at the House of Nature.
Photo: OHM.LV