Meeting Abstract

91.3  Sunday, Jan. 6  Virtual labs and activities: Tools for students and an opportunity to broaden your Broader Impacts HODIN, J.*; MILLER, P.; EPEL, D.; Hopkins Marine Station, Stanford Univ., Pacific Grove, CA USA; Hopkins Marine Station, Stanford Univ., Pacific Grove, CA USA; Hopkins Marine Station, Stanford Univ., Pacific Grove, CA USA seastar@stanford.edu

Our team facilitates educational outreach at the high school and college level by producing high quality, topical, freely-accessible digital tools designed to complement classroom and laboratory experiences in biology and environmental science. The enormously popular Sea Urchin Embryology site (launched in 1997) exploits the numerous possibilities of using sea urchins and their embryos in the classroom. Its modern counterpart, VirtualUrchin, offers interactive activities and tutorials ranging from microscopy skills to an ocean acidification (OA) experiment, where students explore a current research issue by entering our ‘virtual lab bench,’ setting up an OA experiment (using real data from our colleagues Thorndyke & Dupont) and measuring the effects on urchin larval growth. We designed our lab bench in a modular fashion, and are modifying it for a lab involving embryo manipulations and microinjection. We have also designed activities on salmon migration, and, most recently, an international high school project allowing students to calculate, explore and discuss their carbon footprints. The modular design of our tools allows us effective dissemination of a wide range of research topics while addressing their broader impacts, now a strict requirement of many funding agencies, notably NSF. We propose a partnership with SICB members, where our media design and curriculum staff works with researchers to develop and disseminate high quality educational outreach activities based upon their research. We discuss possibilities for funding such activities, including inclusion in individual research grant proposals.