The Spring Family Day at Swansea University hosts the launch of the AMBER Citizen Science Program

Swansea University celebrated the start of spring with a range of family friendly activities for all ages across the Pak Campus for staff, students and their whole families to enjoy. More than 300 people attended the event with the game ‘A Trout’s Journey’ one of the highlighted activities. Josh Jones and Deiene Rodriguez showed children aged 5 – 11 what it’s like to be a migratory fish in European rivers.

At the start of the game players pretended to be young salmon and trout living behind rocks hunting for invertebrates. After landing on a few water bonus and invertebrate squares they were strong enough to go downstream to mature and reproduce in the ocean. On their travels downstream players encountered obstacles, dangerous predators and many adventures. When players landed on the various hazards explanations were given to the parents and older children about what happened when fish came up against these issues in the wild. There were lots of barriers on the board game and these were used as an opportunity to promote the Barrier Tracker app and to explain that we don’t know where all the barriers are so we need them all to become citizen scientists to help us locate them.

Children also had fun enjoying the Happy Fish Challenge, an activity to get engaged in the world of fish migration and help them understand importance of fish migration.