Fledge!As part of a Royal Society-funded outreach project between the University of Sheffield and Maltby Academy entitled 'The Secret Life of Birds', I worked with students to develop a board game based on the life of garden birds. In the game, called 'Fledge!', each player is a robin and must rear offspring while navigating the dangers faced by garden birds, such as starvation and predation.
Fledge! aims to introduce people to important concepts in behavioural ecology, such as the trade-offs that animals face over survival versus reproduction. Fledge! was successfully premiered by students from Maltby Academy at the 2016 Royal Society Summer Science Exhibition. |
Outreach in secondary schools
I am passionate about bringing the study of animal behaviour and ecology into schools and have visited a number of schools in North Wales, Yorkshire and Sussex to give talks and help to run practical classes on bird and insect identification. Recently, I ran a lesson aimed at introducing students to the wonderful world of wasps. For this, I developed an interactive game where students assumed the role of paper wasps whose nests had been parasitised by 'cuckoo wasps' (left). As the time ticked down to the end of summer, students had to make rapid, strategic decisions about how to respond to the parasite (stay on the nest and hope that it dies; abandon and quickly build a new nest; abandon and try to join another group) in an effort to recoup their losses and produce offspring.