For our Kenan Fellows lesson product we are working to bring microbiology to the middle school Science classroom. Students participating in our project will broaden their understanding of soil/plant symbiosis by culturing and examining beneficial plant microbes. Students will participate in genuine citizen science by recording data about microbe growth and reporting their data back to Dr. Stevens who is looking for patterns of plant microbe growth.
In creating our project we are facing 3 major challenges. 1) We have to educate teachers on the connection between soil microbes and plant health, 2) we have to find a way to get lab supplies into the classroom and 3) we have to make “microbiology” less scary for middle school teachers.
So far, I am not completely satisfied with our lesson in terms of addressing our first challenge of educating teachers on the existence and benefit of soil microbes. Although the idea is mentioned several times throughout our work, we can do a better job of addressing teacher education in the future development of our product. In terms of the other 2 challenges that I mentioned, I do feel that we have done a good addressing accessibility with our project so far. We have experiment with and written detailed protocols for creating agar (a growth medium for microbes) with soil and other household goods. We have also started talking with Science House about creating kits that teachers can check out to do our project. In order to help teachers feel more comfortable doing our project we have made detailed videos of all of the steps of the project, are working on editing them, and will post them to YouTube for teachers to access. Our main aim is to show teachers that they can do our project and that their kids can get something meaningful out of it. We are still working toward this goal, but I believe that we are on the right track!
Team Dirt Presenting at the Museum