The CMU team conducted on-boat contextual studies of Voyager's Environmental Science program. Thorugh these observations, Voyager's deep-rooted culture and educational philosophy became immediately apparent. Voyager takes pride in putting science into students' hands. Moving away from the rote, one-way delivery of modern classrooms, we observed the importance of engaging students at all legs of the on-boat experience.

The CMU team recognized early on that any technology introduced should still place emphasis on the instructor-student dynamic already in place. Large-screen displays and instructor interfaces should only exist to augment an instructor's efforts to engage students, whether through teaching or the various data collection and observation activities students do.

The primary challenge for the team then was to define a unifying architecture for Voyager that would support the primary activities of categorizing, preparing, and presenting information to students. Further, instructor attention during teaching needed to be only minimally on the interface, focused on the students as fully as possible. Through a variety of instructor interviews and user-tests using prototypes of varying fidelity, the CMU team moved closer to a solution that could seamlessly weave itself into Voyager's everyday practice. In August 2006, the team aims to deliver to Voyager a solution immediately usable "out of the box" on a given on-boat station.