Young Ocean Explorers - Inspiring kids to love our ocean

Young Ocean Explorers started off as a kids' TV series, with underwater cameraman Steve Hathaway taking his daughter, Riley, on adventures looking for New Zealand’s biggest, scariest and most fascinating marine creatures. They produced stories on orca, turtles, sharks, dolphins, rays, lobster etc.

In 2017 they launched their interactive site Young Ocean Explorers with many hours of free highly engaging videos, polls and quizzes. It is a free site that was developed to be used in schools, targeting year 1-8 classes (5-13 year olds). The site was intentionally designed to target teachers, as for every teacher that uses the site, there are 30-60 children who learn about the ocean.

In 2021 Young Ocean Explorers ran their inaugural ’21 Day Challenge’, with over 1100 New Zealand classes participating in the 21 days of lesson plans around the theme of ‘Restoring the Hauraki Gulf’. With about 30,000 children participating and over 100,000 pieces of plastic picked up from their local streets, Young Ocean Explorers aim to scale this as an annual event.

Young Ocean Explorers want to capture children’s imaginations through great storytelling, bringing the beauty, awe and fascination of the ocean and its inhabitants alive. Their vision is to create generational change by connecting hearts and minds with the importance of enjoying and caring for our oceans and giving this generation of environmental natives tools to make a better future. There’s never been a more vital time for the health of the ocean and this planet than now!