WSU STEM Corvid Outreach
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Date: 06/03/2018 Time: 09:00 EST |
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Cast: | |
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It's a rainy Sunday morning and Alma and Tori are seated at a corner
table. Alma's rainshell is draped over her chair. There's a coffee cup
half full, and a closed journal next to it. Tori is there with a tea to
go, in a jogging outfit, with her own rainshell draped over a chair next
to Alma's. Her rainshell still has drops of rain on it. Alma's is
dry. "People love seeing the antics of crows, so with our channel we can have those intersperced with some fun educational clips plus the investigative stuff. I've got a lot of likes on instagram for the action shots. I can help organize a slide deck. You give a short presentation at Amelia Earhart, and then we can host a field trip to the Zoo! Maybe give the kids hands on experience banding." Tori is explaining things to Alma, who looks a little skeptical. "I don't know. I haven't given talks to... Maybe you should do it. I can be in the background and help with the hands on stuff." Jim generally doesn't work on a Sunday, and when he does he feels guilty about it. So standard Catholic practice there. It's raining, so he spends as much time in Corvid as possible, but getting a note from Alma, he manages to get into the Starbucks getting wet as little as possible. Alma looks up when she sees Jim enter the coffee shop. "Hey, I was working and then Tori stopped by. She's been telling me about this campus outreach program for k12 schools? The kids get to meet WSU researchers?" Alma looks a little out of her element. Tori turns to talk to Jim, "Yeah, like we can go and show some of the work we do and all the different things that go in to it. And maybe cover some of the applications and impacts. Scicomm yeah? I've been contacting schools... showing them our group channel. I'm thinking we could give a presentation with hands on stuff. You could talk about the engineering stuff. Maybe we could do this in a couple of visits. At the school for blahblahblah and then we join the Zoo wetlands folks who do the bird tracking on the islandsto monitor health and the kids can see how things work there--some of the same tech is used, but it's high end. Then we can show how you can do some of the same stuff with things accessible for citizen science, or classrooms." Alma says, "It sounds cool, we were wondering what you think." Jim smiles, and gives a wave to each. "Miss Alma, Miss Tori, howdy," he says, looking mostly to Tori. "I've heard you were on the team now, good to meet you." He grabs a chair, and turns it to sit backwards in it while facing the women. "So what you're saying is, you want me to talk to kids about engineering?" Tori says, "Yeah, and discuss applications in field biology. Maybe have some really simple boards with sensors they can play with." She shows Jim some links on her phone to lowcost Adafruit arduino sensor boards that get used in educational settings and which are pretty fucking cool if you ask her. "Or maybe take some of our rpis and demo those, but those boards are a lot simpler for immediate use and can show the principles." Alma says, "Yeah, maybe? And I can show the more traditional methods." She pulls out her phone and shows Jim a video clip from their youtube channel. "Check out this one. It has lots of likes." It's a video of a raven. Jim hums, and shrugs. "Sounds good to me. It's all what I'm getting credit for, doing things for this group. So if we're taking a day to do that instead that's fine." He then pauses, and looks to Alma. "Unless you'd rather bring a raven along that day..." Alma gives Jim a look. "It depends on how /educational/ it might be. The engineering aspect is pretty cool." Tori says, "I can see either. Ask the teachers. Depending on the class they might know what the kids would enjoy more. Or maybe what would fit more in to the current lesson plans?" Jim lets out a laugh. Looking to Tori again. "Well, if we bring a raven along that day, I'll stay home. It would be too much to try to cram in both. Imagine having an actual bird there to make the noises we're recording on the computers?" "That /would/ be pretty cool," Tori tells Alma. Then to Jim, "You could demo the Cornell software on the recording? But if you're busy we could show that and just give an elevator pitch on the sound identification process." Alma looks like she thinks the idea is pretty cool. But, along with a quirk of a smile she is giving Jim a look that might communicate how cool of an idea it could be but that she doesn't want him screwing with the education of people. Geez, he might think. Sometimes she's such a stick in the mud. Along with that expression she says, "Well Jim, what do you think? I'll leave it up to you two. This group is about your educations too." She looks to Jim and Tori, a question on her face. Jim hums, and snickers again. He's really smiling as he considers this. "I think that if I give you two a run down on the Cornell software, it would be plenty for the raven to steal the show. I'll pick the right one, one of the regulars at the observation stations." Alma says, "I like that idea. I'm up for it." Looking at Tori she says, "I can go over our osf page and fields notes and stuff? I don't know what makes an interesting thing to show people." She shrugs. She's never been great at communicating birb stuff with non birb people. They never seem interested in the details. Tori says, "No problem. We can do it." To Jim she says, "Nice to see you for a change. We never really sync up enough. Preparing for this will be kickass.." She heads out to go on her jog. Alma says to Jim, "I wish she was around when I was trying to recruit people." | |
