The last few days have been less harsh than previous ones. This week everyone collectively focused on the extension portion of our projects for outreach. The purpose of doing these outreach programs is to inform 8 -14 year-olds about our projects and the importance of how our projects are relative to the environment. For our project, my partner and I deviated a little bit from our research. Instead of focusing solely on bats, we changed the extension portion of our project to the detection of soundwaves in an ecosystem. Essentially, we will talk about how soundwaves are emitted and how soundwaves exist on different frequencies. Some frequencies are too high or too low for the human ear to hear. Wildlife, however, hear better at frequencies we cannot detect. We will also do an activity with them where the kids will pick out cards with an animal on the front and a spectrogram on the back. They will listen to the soundwave of various animals and dance out how they think their animal would act based off their soundwave. For example, a bunny would hop, or a bobcat would motion the scratching of claws.

Halfway through the week, we also took some high schoolers out in the field to collect insect data from our pitfall traps so they could have a visualization of how we collect our data and how we use that data. Overall, they enjoyed themselves and attentively listened when we talked about our projects. Majority of them said they would be happy to pursue forestry and natural sciences as a career.

Here's my submission for the contest: