Developing Education Materials For Coastal Ocean Explorers: Sharks!

By Alex Magda – Spring and Summer 2026 Intern

I was super fortunate to be a part of the ANGARI crew as an intern for the spring and summer of 2026!  Throughout my time I learned invaluable lessons and made some amazing memories that I will carry with me throughout my career. I am so grateful to have helped out with a variety of tasks, whether it was helping onboard during the Coastal Ocean Explorers: Sharks expeditions, developing programs for both the public and school groups, participating in outreach events, helping with Lagoon Drift deployment or working in the office, each day was a new challenge or adventure!

My main focus throughout my internship was helping to create educational materials about sharks for different audiences. In the spring, I created a presentation for the general public about the sharks of Palm Beach County and their important role in our environments. While I was creating that, I also helped with spring Coastal Ocean Explorers: Sharks expeditions, where I got to experience firsthand the ins and outs of working on a research vessel with a crew and scientists. The Coastal Ocean Explorers: Sharks program partners with scientists from Florida International University (FIU) to bring middle and high school students onto the R/V ANGARI for a day of shark research right in Palm Beach County! This is a busy but exciting day full of science, learning and hopefully a lot of sharks! During my time with ANGARI, I was on multiple expeditions such as the research methods with FIU (Expedition #113), 7 student expeditions (Expeditions #114 – 120), a sea turtle release with John D. MacArthur Beach State Park (Expedition #124) and the Lake Worth Lagoon Educator workshop (Expedition #125). On these expeditions, I helped prepare the students and participants to go out on the back deck to assist the scientists with different research methods, helped with safety procedures and aided with any other crew duties needed! Before the spring expeditions, I had also helped to create a “Guess the Species” game for the students to play during the downtime in between drumline sets, and got to test it out on all of our student groups! It was a great success and seemed like a fun interactive game for the students to learn more about the shark species in Palm Beach County!

As spring wrapped up, I directed my focus to addressing the need of what students could do individually while they wait for their groups’ turn on expeditions. This led to me creating a workbook that they can use throughout the day, full of worksheets about sharks and our program! I was super fortunate to be able to test it out on our educators during the summer workshop, in order to receive feedback from the people that know these students the best! Now these workbooks are ready for the Fall 2026 expeditions! Both of the projects I created allowed me to use my creativity to educate people about sharks, allowing me to gain more experience working with different programs like Powerpoint and Canva, as well as grow my skills of informal education! 

It is hard to pick my favorite memory over these past 8 months, because my time with ANGARI has truly been so great. I will say the expedition days were the ones I was most looking forward to, and they definitely lived up to expectations. Each one brought a different and new experience, but one of my favorite memories was our last student expedition with Palm Beach Day Academy (Expedition #120). After being postponed due to weather, we went out a few months later in May, and ended up catching a total of 4 sharks that day! We had 2 male tiger sharks, a male bull shark and a male Atlantic sharpnose shark! It was so cool watching the scientists safely secure the sharks to the boat and have the students help conduct the scientific workup! Throughout my time with ANGARI, watching students discover an interest and appreciation for sharks was definitely one of the biggest highlights. It was so rewarding to see them so excited and eager to learn more about these amazing animals and being a part of that learning experience!

I am leaving this internship with so much more knowledge and preparedness for the next step in my career. The ANGARI team created an amazing work environment that made me excited for whatever opportunity the day brought! I would encourage anyone interested in marine science, education, citizen science or conservation to apply for this internship. I have had an unforgettable experience working with ANGARI and I am thankful to the entire crew for helping me learn and grow both professionally and personally!