The Wagner lab is heavily involved in outreach activities. Our goal is to implement activities that help to translate our research to a broader audience — to kids, teachers, the public, and colleagues around the world.

K-12 Lesson Plan Development

As part of our current NSF grant, we are developing Next-Generation Science Standard (NGSS) based lesson plans for middle school science classrooms. One component of these lesson plans involves using short films to discuss what evolutionary biologists study. See the first of these films below!

Asking Questions about the Evolution of Life from CaravanLab on Vimeo.

We partnered with the University of Wyoming Art Museum to conduct a teacher training workshop for K-12 science and art teachers where we linked concepts in evolutionary biology with art principles to create “phyloge-mobiles”! This was a fantastic success, and the lesson plans we are developing will include a modified version of this activity to use in science classrooms to teach “tree-thinking”.

R Workshops in Africa

As another component of our current NSF grant, we are conducting R workshops for our African colleagues and collaborators. The first of these was in July 2018, and was a huge success, thanks to the hard work of PhD students Jessica Rick and Jimena Golcher Benavides. The workshop took place in Kigoma, Tanzania, and included 21 participants from Tanzanian Fisheries Research Institute locations all over Tanzania. You can read more about the 2018 workshop here!