Designing a Better Beak
Students will work as teams and use principles of Design Thinking to help design and construct a model of a bird beak to best take advantage of the food available in a simulated environment.
Lesson Plan
Low cost materials
Experimenting with environmental factors needed to grow algae
Students will study conditions favorable to growing Chlamydomonas, a genus of algae cultured at the Pringle Lab at Stanford University, to determine influential factors related to growth, life cycle, and reproductive rates.
Intro into Biotechnology
The goal of this ETP is to teach students two of the basic but integral biotechnological techniques, micropipetting and gel electrophoresis. Every single experiment done at The Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI) uses these two techniques.
Oakland Youth Care about Oaks
This ETP is an expansion of "Predicting Forest Health: Sudden Oak Death in Coast Live Oak Trees" created by the Ignited Fellow, Angelica Corral in 2017. Sudden oak death (SOD) is a disease infecting various oak species on the West Coast.
Lesson Plan
Low cost materials
Race to the Sun
Chlamydomonas is a unicellular bi-flagellated green algae. This eukaryotic protist can be found in lakes, ponds, and oceans.
Soil Matters Too!
This lesson will introduce students to the basics of decomposition and microbial soil respiration and how these processes influence the carbon cycle.
A Salt on Germination
Going beyond what most students in 9-12 already know about the factors required to help seeds sprout and grow (water, warmth, substrate), the investigation in "A Salt on Germination" focuses on the practice of calculating how much of a concentrated stock must be used to create a diluted