Seaweed at the Natural Science Festival

Students from Grenaa Gymnasium will disseminate knowledge how to turn seaweed into food

Preparations are in full sving at Grenaa Gymnasium for the annual nationwide Natural Science Festival. In Grenaa the festival is on at Kattegatcentret, a local oceanarium. This year’s theme is The Secrets of Water.
“To us this theme makes seaweed an obvious choice of study,” geography teacher Hanne Krøyer says. “We have established a fine contact with a local company, Nordisk Tang, that produces foods from seaweed. They have provided us with seaweed and lactid acid bacteria for the students’ experiments. Actually, it is a former student from this school, Lilli Gruwier who is now a biologist and employed in Nordisk Tang who has kindly helped us.”

“Issues of climate and ressources are part of the curriculum that we teach. More food needs to be produced in the future and seaweed is very nutritious, is available in all parts of the world, does not require additional farmland and on top of that it is beneficial to the aquatic system. But to make it edible it must be processed and examples of how this can be done is what the students will demonstrate at the festival,” Hanne Krøyer explains and adds that there will be tastes.

It is not only in the geography classes that students study seaweed in preparation of the Natural Science Festival. In biology the focus is on the molecules that allow seaweeds to grow at differing water depts, and in physics the students examine the light that passes through to the seaweeds on different water depts and how this affects its growth conditions.