Santa Clara University's Marine Education Program

Designing, developing and implementing a marine education program from scratch can be a formidable task. Despite being landlocked and facing competition from traditional Silicon Valley projects, Santa Clara University’s (SCU) Robotic Systems Laboratory (RSL) has successfully established a stable, ongoing, undergraduate marine education program in less than seven years. More than 100 students have participated in the program with approximately 50 focusing their capstone design project on a marine-themed problem. This project-based education program first engages students in a marine operations course and then draws the top students into working with the RSL on an underwater vehicle development project for their senior-year, capstone design thesis. The project requirements are derived from RSL and RSL science partner research objectives. This paper will describe the framework of the marine education program that the RSL has developed throughout the past seven years at Santa Clara University and how that framework produces undergraduate and graduate students who are able to not only design, build, and operate underwater vehicles but also perform research with them.