Fieldtrip!
September 28, 2016
It’s a glorious morning in beautiful Hawaii. A perfect day for a classroom field trip to visit the USS Arizona Memorial in Pearl Harbor.
For many students that can’t come to Hawaii to visit the hallowed grounds of Pearl Harbor, the National World War II Museum (NWWIIM) in New Orleans is preparing to launch a virtual classroom experience in their museum on the 75th anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor.
Working together with the National Park Service and WYES-TV, a New Orleans non-profit educational television foundation, and using the services and crew of Hawaii Public Television, NWWIIM conducted interviews with Pearl Harbor survivors Al Rodrigues and Sterling Cale; and civilian eyewitnesses, Jimmy Lee and Robert Lee. Julia, a Kaiser High School student reporter, artfully engaged each interviewee to share their personal experience in front of the camera at the Pearl Harbor Visitor Center.
To capture footage that will be integrated in the virtual classroom, the camera crew strolled through and filmed the museum exhibits and grounds of the Visitor Center before taking the boat trip to the USS Arizona Memorial. For the purpose of providing a sense of being there on that fateful morning, civilian eyewitness Jimmy Lee, who was only 11 years old at the time of the attack, took the camera crew and student reporter Julia to the fishponds where he witnessed the attack.