Our first STEM friday using the guppy kits

Ready or not (we were definitely ready), today was the day! We had our first run with 24 real, live students from Ms. Jordan's 7th grade class at Wellington Middle School. STEM fridays are an event hosted by the Education and Outreach Center (more info here) where local teachers are invited to bring up to 30 students to CSU to participate in their chosen kit activity. It's a chance for students to come to CSU and see what it's like, as well as an opportunity to learn something in the process. I must say, as my first time doing one of these events, and our first time doing it with the guppy kits, it went fantastically! As we expected, there are some changes to be made, but the students were happy, excited, and involved, which is what we were hoping for.

Here are some highlights:

All 15 kits ready to go!

Dale ready to scoop up fish

Andrew checking the intro video on the projector

...and they're here! Andrew welcoming everyone

Watching the intro video

And they're off!

Acquiring guppies

Examining differences between guppies

Comparing colors to a color chart

Making a histogram of brightness scores for each population
Red is low-predation, blue is high-predation

The final figure

Making punnet squares

Rolling the 4-sided die to see which
offspring are chosen for the
next generation

Using a predator silhouette to predict predator
avoidance strategies of each population

Watching predator-prey encounter videos

Discussing predation

A tally of which guppies were captured

Discussing which fish is from which population

Clean-up time

Final thoughts in science notebooks

Representative evaluations

Now we are one step closer to being able to share our kit design with everyone!