The Voyage of the Mimi

Several weeks ago I wrote a post about how I first got interested in science. In that post I wrote about doing experiments with my mom one summer when I was pretty young. Another thing that helped build interest for me was a teacher I had in 5th grade back in 1985. His name was Mr. Hill. I remember that he was one of the first teachers in all of Washoe County to have a computer lab. In fact we had two classrooms, one was a regular room where we spent about half of every day and the other was right next door and was filled with old TRS-80 computers. Just about every cell phone you can buy today and even most calculators are more powerful but at the time they were the best you could get. In addition to giving me my first introduction to programming he also taught a lot of science. One activity we did that year was tied to an old PBS series called The Voyage of the Mimi. It was a series that PBS made that combined a 15 minute fictional story about a boy, his grandfather, and a group of scientists who were sailing on the ocean and searching for whales. The second half of each episode was a documentary that explained the science you saw in the first half. I remember getting really into the stories and wanting to design my own experiments to go along with it. The entire series is now available on Youtube. Check out the first episode below!