outreach
Side by side
Where does culture end, and ecology begin? What can we learn about our current conservation crisis from spaces that are designed to be shared by humans and animals? Collaborator Aaron Treher and I sought to address this question by building creative barn swallow habitat and studying visitation rates by swallows from a nearby colony. With support from the NEST Studio for the Arts, Inside the Greenhouse, and the Art & Rural Environments Field School, we put on a public event to bring artists and conservationists together in rural Colorado.
Alaska Summer Research Academy
Together with gadget wizard extraordinaire, Kina Smith, I co-designed and co-taught a two-week summer camp for high school students. We taught students to build electronic sensors, and use them to conduct their own environmental research project. Student projects included:
- measuring sound reception ability of different animal ear models
- automatic detection & air quality characterization of passing traffic
- measuring air quality near paved/unpaved roads
CU Museum of Natural History Family Days
As part of the Evolution Outreach Committee at CU, I've helped with several museum outreach days by designing and conducting kids activities, including:
- exploring vision across the animal kingdom (K-6)
- hearing the impact of noise pollution on whale song (6-12)
Visiting scientist & instructor
I've designed and taught activities as a visiting scientist for summer camps and middle and high school classrooms. Please get in touch if you are a K-12 teacher covering one of the following topics - I would be happy to coordinate a classroom visit!
- Bird ecology (example activity: nest building)
- Insect ecology (example activity: pitfall trapping & identifying insect biodiversity)
- Evolution / Natural selection (example activity: evolving paper planes)
- Sexual selection / mating systems (example activity: card genotypes & assortative mating)