COMPARISON OF FOUR DIFFERENT VENUES FOR OUTREACH IN NORTH CAROLINA  

The Marine Aquaculture Research Center in Marshallburg NC provides the opportunity to share with various constituencies, primarily community, commercial and research personnel.  This facility is close to the North Carolina coast (a tidal creek allows us to draw marine water for use), but somewhat distant from major population centers.  This is a strictly NCSU facility, allowing relatively good control of experiments and demonstrations that occur at the facility.  A board of advisors has been constituted to advise with best techniques to perform research and extension at the facility.

The "fish barn" is located in suburban Raleigh, a metro area of over 1 million.  This intermediate sized facility is located on the grounds of NCSU's farm.  This allows groups of students, community members, engineers, and other practitioners to visit, but this is largely a freshwater facility of moderate size.

An on-campus facility housed at the Department of Biological and Agricultural Engineering has even less space but is much more accessible to the 34,000 students at NCSU and the 8000 faculty and staff members.  Developing small scale demonstrations that convey ideas about aquaculture and also performing controlled experiments at this facility as well as much more controlled space at the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences Grinnell Laboratories tends to be a balancing act between sharing new ideas and performing controlled science experiments in limited space far from the coast.  

This presentation will compare and contrast these venues for outreach.