SciREN (the Scientific Research and Education Network) hosted the 3rd annual Teacher-Researcher networking event on February 12th at the North Carolina Aquarium at Pine Knoll Shores. Prior to the event, local researchers prepared lesson plans that incorporated their own research interests and also satisfied North Carolina education standards. The objective of the event was for local STEM educators and researchers to meet face to face, for researchers to share their lesson plans, and for researchers and educators to make lasting connections that could involve future classroom visits. Over 110 educators and 70 researchers were present at the event, and educators gave overwhelmingly positive feedback via surveys they took at the end of the event.
Johnson Lab member Alyse Larkin has served on the SciREN executive committee for the past two years, and participated as a researcher at the first SciREN Coast event in 2013. Sarah Loftus
also joined the SciREN Coast executive team this year and
presented her first lesson plan. Alyse’s lesson plan focuses on the distribution of the ocean’s most abundant phytoplankton, Prochlorococcus, and how this distribution may shift with climate change. Sarah’s lesson plan focuses on microalgae growth requirements for producing algal biofuels. The lesson plan involves students role-playing as managers of their own algae farms, in which they make decisions about how to grow their algae (i.e., where to site their facility, what growth systems to use, which algae species to grow).
A new feature of the SciREN website is the Portal, which is an online directory in which educators and researchers can keep in contact, and where researchers can upload lesson plans available for educators to search, peruse, and download.
