CRPA - Informal Education with Arachnids

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This Connecting Researchers and Public Audiences project will engage diverse public audiences, especially K-12 students, around the PI's research on arachnid evolution. This research spans disparate fields of evolutionary biology, ecology, zoology and neurobiology, among others. The goals of the project are to elucidate the scientific process and convey challenging scientific concepts to the target audiences. The project will forge new collaborations between the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Lincoln Community Learning Centers' After School Program, the Lincoln Children's Zoo, and the University of Nebraska State Museum. The project's various components, designed to achieve the project's overall goals, include: inquiry-based activities developed for after school programs, an interactive exhibit focused on arachnids for the zoo, and family-based multiple activities for the Museum's special events. The evaluation of the project will study the impact that these activities have on the knowledge, attitudes, and intended career plans of participants. This project is expected to strengthen the informal science education of its local community and strengthen relationships between the institutions involved. In addition, undergraduate and graduate students participating in Informal Education with Arachnids will gain important experience in communicating with public audiences and making their research comprehensible to the lay public. Resources developed under this grant will be freely available through the University of California, Berkeley's NSF-funded website "Understanding Evolution." The summative evaluation report will be posted on informalscience.org.