Xinzo de Limia´s sea

More than 100 students from the IES Lagoa de Antela institute made 10 cardboard structures recreating different marine animals.

In the school lobby, a total of 105 1st year ESO students made different structures recreating life-size sharks, rays, sea turtles, dolphins and an orca; hanging 6 meters high. The project was coordinated by professors Lucia Parente (biology and geology) and Horacio González (plastic education, technology and digitalization).

The process was based on a series of objectives. They studied the morphology of the animals, creating them on a small scale in clay. With the help of a series of computer programs they digitized the figures in 3D, editing and modifying the images to calculate the real dimensions of the different animals to be created. These dimensions were transferred to cardboard plates to reconstruct the figures by accumulation of parallel planes. After obtaining a total of 854 pieces, they joined them with more than 3,000 cardboard blocks to connect them together. This project could not have been carried out without the collaboration of Estuches y Embalajes Ourense, which provided all the cardboard boxes to make the figures, and the Municipality of Xinzo de Limia, which collaborated in hanging the figures.

The largest figure was that of an orca that measures more than 5 m in length, which is crowning the lobby. The Mar de Antela was inaugurated on October 18, where all the regional authorities appeared. Among the different activities that were carried out, CEMMA (Coordinator for the Study of Marine Mammals) gave 3 talks to first-year students about the biology and anatomy of killer whales, helped by the different materials prepared in the FriendSHIP orcas project, funded by the Santander Foundation.