Hydrological Sciences

How has ChatGPT changed the way you teach hydrology?

Bettina Schaefli June 14, 2023

Generated with beta.dreamstudio.ai, with the prompt: “a class of students in a lecture hall, sketch”, changed into black and white

Have you ever used ChatGPT to teach hydrology? If so, when did you start? I opened my account on openai.com in November 2022, out of curiosity, to test GPT-3 (Generative Pretrained Transformer generation 3). This was shortly before ChatGPT was launched (30 November 2022). Now, I even have a paid account to speed up the preparation of non-scientific texts, e.g. teaching materials on the use of Exce ...[Read More]

The Legend of Zelda: A Link to Learning Hydrology?

Taylor Maavara and Lewis Alcott April 5, 2023

Image generated with dreamstudio.ai, prompt "breath of the wild video game with Link that teaches the player about river hydrology"

Can we learn about hydrology through video games? Plenty of educational video games exist specifically to teach scientific concepts, but lots of these games are not particularly fun. But can popular commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) video games fulfill the same function of teaching players scientific concepts through tangential learning as a secondary benefit to enjoying the game? Existing peer revi ...[Read More]

Where should hydrology go?

Harro Jongen and Tessa van Hateren March 1, 2023

Thanks to Janneke Remmers for the photo

In 1965, UNESCO launched the first International Hydrological Decade to promote hydrology as an independent scientific discipline. This initiative has since grown into a global movement boosting hydrological research around a changing theme: the International Association of Hydrological Sciences (IAHS) Scientific Decades. The last two decades have shown that community efforts can shape the field o ...[Read More]

Scientific disobedience: where are our catchment boundaries?

Sylvain Kuppel December 16, 2022

Road block in central Munich (Odeonplatz) on Oct 26th, 2022. Photo: Scientist Rebellion

On the night preceding Halloween, somewhere in the main police station of Munich, 15 people appeared one by one before a judge of the local court who notified them their deprivation of liberty, deemed as “indispensable in order to prevent the imminent commission/continuation of a criminal/orderly offence of considerable importance for the general public”. For most of them this preventive custody w ...[Read More]