Outreach Activities
MSU 4-H Children’s Garden
Deploying Raspberry Pi based imaging platforms in the MSU 4-H Children’s Garden for staff to take time-lapse photographs of plants in the greenhouse, growth chambers, and outdoor Children’s Garden. Images from these experiments will be analyzed in local classrooms where students will engage in building the Raspberry Pi based imaging platforms, observing plant growth and development through time, and analyzing growth data in collaboration with Trainees from the NRT program. A combination of biology and computational science Trainee pair will work together within a classroom.
Darwin Discovery Day
Trainees will participate in Darwin Discovery Day sponsored by the MSU Museum and develop interactive activities that highlight the power of computation to solve biological problems.
Coding Camp for Girls
To encourage broader participation in computational science, we will sponsor a Coding Camp for Girls through the existing summer Spartan Youth program at MSU. The Spartan Youth program has over 200 summer courses spanning agriculture, computer science, mathematics, and leadership skills for K-12 students. The coding camp will be led by Trainees and will show by example that women are strong programmers and have careers in computer science fields.
Raspberry Pi Jam
We will host a Raspberry Pi Jam on the MSU campus to embrace the use of microcomputers, robotics, and data science in basic and applied plant research. Activities will include Raspberry Pi based demonstrations and interactive stations for soldering, robotics, basic programming, and DNA extraction. The Pi Jam will be organized and run by Trainees in this program with supervision by PI, CoPIs and Trainers.