STEAM for Teens and Tweens: Secrets of the Monarch Butterfly Migration… Evolutionary Biology

STEAM stands for Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Math.

For this course, Dr. Jeremy Hsu states, “I’ve designed a “choose your own adventure” activity where students will work in teams to make choices, interpret data, and evaluate hypotheses. I’ll start by introducing monarch butterflies, mention a few things about their ecology and migration, before challenging students with “the mystery of the migration”. Each group will assume the role of either geneticist or ecologist and will be challenged to determine why monarchs migrate, with two plausible hypotheses: 1) environmental factors trigger the monarch migration, or 2) genetic differences trigger the migration. Groups will be given a different set of initial information and different experimental options (and only a limited set of “grant money” to use, so they’ll have to choose carefully!), and I’ll have the responses for the experiments ready to go on slips of paper. After this “choose your own adventure”, I’ll bring everyone together for a class discussion on what they have learned and provide some more context on everything.”

Each time a teen attends a STEAM for Teens workshop, they receive a ticket which is an entry to our end of program series raffle. The winner(s) of the raffle receive a new laptop computer and printer.