Beach Brain Brings the Classroom to the Gulf
Posted on June 16, 2026
On Lake Shelby at Gulf State Park, a group of young campers worked through a question that lay right at their feet: What fraction of this water is salt? What fraction is fresh?
It was a moment that captured exactly what “Beach Brain” is meant to do: Merge science and math and let kids search for answers by asking real questions about a place they thought they already knew.
The program, a summer day camp funded by an Alabama State Board of Education grant and run by the University of South Alabama College of Education and Professional Studies, in partnership with Gulf Shores City Schools and the support of area businesses, links rising fifth and sixth graders with Gulf Shores High School “teacher cadets” and South students for mornings spent on math and science fundamentals and afternoons spent applying them along the coast — no textbooks needed.
It’s a fresh perspective just because of who is doing the teaching. South students, most of them education majors, are paired with high schoolers who are weighing whether to pursue careers in education. Together, the two groups lead lessons for the campers. It’s one teaching apprenticeship nested inside another: College students sharpening the skills they’ll need in their own future classrooms, high schoolers getting a unique glimpse at whether teaching is right for them, and elementary campers learning from instructors close enough in age to feel like big siblings but far enough ahead to feel like real teachers.
“We start the day with fractions every morning,” said Dr. Angela Barlow, dean of the college and the program’s lead. “Then we do a science lesson that connects with the fraction piece. And in the afternoons, we’re out here on the coast, exploring those scientific ideas that also engage the fractions.”
With the help of faculty and students in South’s Stokes School of Marine and Environmental Sciences, the young students studied water and air pollution and how beach grass and dunes
impact erosion. They went fishing with nets to catch small plankton and other life.
“We’re just getting kids to connect mathematics and science in their own environment,” Barlow said.
By the final day of a five-day session, the routine had paid off. On the shore of a beach near the Gulf State Park Pavilion, kids who arrived Monday, shy and unsure of what to expect, are confidently unlocking the secrets of the sea life they’ve spent their lives around. “It’s a marine algae called sargassum,” explained a rising sixth grader, touching one of the many dense, wiry brown patches of what many would have just called “seaweed” before.
Groups of students combed the beach on a scavenger hunt, cleaning trash from the beach as they went along and applying science lessons they had just absorbed.
For high schoolers and the South students leading the small groups, these moments are the point. Sara-Connor McClellan, a senior elementary education major at South, led the lesson on Lake Shelby, “which is brackish — salt water and fresh water mixed together. And we were talking about what fraction of it we think is more salt water, or fresh water? Does it differ? Does it change every day?”
“You see the light bulb click in the kids’ eyes,” she said. “Just like, wow, they understand it.”
Barlow said the program is collecting data on how the experience affects learning for the campers and career interest for the teacher cadets, with hopes of using it to pursue federal funding to expand Beach Brain to more school districts.
“My goals have been to get kids excited about math and science,” Barlow said. “They’re already excited about being outside. But connecting what they learned to the outdoors was a goal.”
A goal on another level is recruiting prospective teachers. Some of the high schoolers were already leaning toward careers in education. Some, until Beach Brain, weren’t certain of their path.
“Being a teacher, especially after this, is now up in my top 3,” said Xander Smith, a rising high school junior. “I've thought about it, and now I want to be a teacher even more.”
He’d considered teaching at the high school level, but Beach Brain has shifted that — he thinks he wants to teach elementary school.
“They’re more engaged than I ever thought they would be, and it’s wonderful,” Smith said. “I’ve honestly gone into this everyday looking forward to it.”
Beach Brain connected rising fifth and sixth graders with Gulf Shores High School
and South students for mornings spent on math and science fundamentals and afternoons
spent applying them.
