Application Questions:
Your name, and that of your organisation (or the organisation that will receive funds on your behalf).
Alex Hornstein, Wild Lives
Name of event. Make another post with another event name if you have another event.
Owl Prowl by Wild Lives
Email address by which you may be contacted.
alex@wildlives.world
What open science hardware tool(s) will be the focus of your event?
Phone microscopy/open flexure scopes, interdisciplinary curricula
Describe your course or workshop, whom and what it is for, where and when it will be held, how many attendees (IRL or virtual) you expect.
Owl prowls are weekly nature walks for children in our city exploring different facets of an interconnected ecosystem right outside our doors. We are offering them in partnership with our local library. The walks are free for all attendees, and the library is not compensating us for the time we put into the program. This will be a series of nine workshops that we’ll run each week in April and May. We expect between 10-20 children to attend each workshop, along with their parents/caregivers.
The theme for each week will be different — we’ll be hosting the walks during peak Springtime activity in a local cemetery, and there will be an incredible amount of natural activity going on during that time. We have a team of six teachers, and each of us will be leading walks on different weeks.
As an example, one week will focus on watching the five nests of owls that we’ve found in the cemetery, and watching the hatchlings begin to leave the nest, climb through the branches of the tree, and perch, all under the watchful eyes of its parents. We’ll watch through a telephoto lens, at a distance that will not disturb the animals.
Another week will be focused on building ultra-low-cost microscopes with families, using parents’ cell phones, the lens from a $1 laser pointer, a bobby pin, and a bit of tape, and then putting these DIY microscopes in the hands of children to take macro photos and video of the small things they find in the natural world.
Another will be focused on illustrating the things we find in the natural world.
All classes will be held outdoors, rain or shine.
Do you have plans for ongoing activities after this event OR is it intended that the participants will continue activities after this event? If so, describe the intentions and plans here.
Owl Prowls are part of a continually building community of youth nature explorers in New England. Hosting this event series will help us involve whole families and allow for a more flexible opportunity to learn microscopy skills, scientific illustration techniques, and ways to explore and support the natural ecosystem. This program is the first of many ongoing family nature programs that we have planned in collaboration with the community library system in Providence. Owl Prowl is a local, 9-week series, and we are planning a related 6-week program in July called Bibliodiversity where we work across all 9 of the city libraries to run a camera trapping program with children in a biodiversity hotspot in Guatemala. Some projects will be ambitious, headline projects, and others will be local events for a handful of children. What’s important to us is that this is an ongoing, quality relationship with the library and the community.
What event outputs (e.g. teaching materials, curricula, software, etc.) will you make available? Will these outputs carry an open licence?
Owl Prowls are part of a larger collection of curricula which weaves together design, wildlife biology, and open air education. We plan to write up these lessons into a collection, along with documentation from the events we run, and make that collection available to the public.
We haven’t yet decided how best to license the teaching materials — that’s an area of active discussion in our organization
What you will use the grant for, roughly.
This project uses a few materials — we’ll buy some dollar store laser pointers for the DIY microscopy workshop, and maybe some extra clipboards and paper, but we’re mostly using materials that we already have. The most expensive thing is human time. We are a group of wildlife educators, and this is a wildlife education program — I want to be able to pay my people for the hours they put in. We have nine, hour-long programs, plus documentation, plus time afterwards to collect and present the material in a clear and compelling way. I want to use this grant so that I can pay my team to do a bang-up job while offering a free program to the community.
Budget-wise, we’re looking at, roughly
Materials: $50
Teaching time: 1 hour/class * 9 classes * $30/hour = $300
Documentation time: 5 hours * $30/hour = $150
Provide links (references) to documentation or reviews of similar events or works you have executed. School coursework or projects can be listed, even social media posts. Anything to give a sense of what you’re about and your ability to successfully conduct this course or workshop. To keep this short, just the links and their descriptions will do.
- wildlives.world — our organization has now run 14 classes and workshops about observing the natural world.
- https://www.instagram.com/wildlivesclass/ — plenty of photos and videos on the gram
- wildlives.world/media - a collection of videos and stories about “the Unseen in the Anthropocene”, all based on our students’ observations and their process of discovery.