INTERACTIVE WORKSHOP – HOW TO EASILY RECREATE THE HANDS-ON LEARNING ACTIVITIES IN AN ONLINE ENVIRONMENT IN STEM FIELDS

Online teaching and learning are now the new normal. Despite this rapid shift to online, lecturers still have no reliable means to provide students with hands on learning opportunities, especially in STEM related fields. As a result, universities are struggling to provide interactive and social activities to replace the in-person activities they had in tutorials and laboratory practicals. In this workshop, I will highlight the suite of mobile applications and games I have co-designed with scientists and researchers to help excite and engage students in STEM fields. These apps are intuitive and designed to encourage students to interact with one another to easily and quickly collect and visualise data in real time so they can practice critical thinking and teamwork, developing necessary soft skills. This means experiments are accurately completed in 10 minutes, allowing teachers to spend more time with their students. With over 30 different apps that help teachers engage their students in biology, maths, chemistry, psychology, ethics – these apps teach across an integrated curriculum. I will also highlight how I have developed an engaging and interactive online approach and presence to deliver my online teaching. I will demonstrate the hardware and software I have assembled to be able to perform these lessons. Come prepared to be part of the workshop and work together with others exactly as your students would

USING TECHNOLOGIES THAT STUDENTS ARE COMFORTABLE WITH TO IMPROVE INTERACTIVITY IN ONLINE LEARNING

The rapid move to online teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic demonstrated that universities and schools were unprepared for large-scale online teaching. Poor internet capabilities and lack of interactive online opportunities meant that lectures and laboratory practicals were replaced with videos and online assignments, decreasing student interaction and hands-on learning opportunities. In this seminar, I discuss how we used technologies that students already use in their daily lives (YouTube Live, Twitch, Discord, Mobile devices) to engage them in authentic experiential online learning where students felt part of a community of learners. In our university classes, lecture attendance grew from 13% for face-to-face lectures to 59% in online lectures. We also saw a 10-fold increase in online interactivity during live online lectures. We saw similar results for our science outreach with primary and high school students using Arludo apps—video games designed to teach scientific concepts through scenario-based experiences. All students stated this form of teaching helped them feel like part of a scientific community. Our combination of a social online learning management system with a real-time chat interface and mobile games to engage in scientific thinking and data collection provides an inexpensive and exciting way forward to teach online

The use of mobile devices to improve the practice of scientific thinking and the scientific process

Much of what students learn in science is invisible, which means that theoretical scientific concepts underlying student understanding are often difficult to explain. Additionally, the data required to visualise these theoretical concepts are often difficult to collect as it requires specialised equipment and is time consuming. It is thus difficult to provide students with the hands-on experiences they require to master these concepts; this is a more fundamental problem in online-only courses. To solve this problem, I’ve created a library of mobile applications that engage students in scientific thinking while encouraging peer-to-peer social interactions. As they interact, these applications collect scientific data that allows students to quickly and accurately visualise the concepts they are learning. In this manner, students gain hand-on experiences through immersive situational learning, and gain novel insights into more difficult to understand theoretical concepts as they perform the behaviours associated with the data gathering. In other words, the library of mobile apps allows students to rapidly and accurately practice being scientists, allowing students to learn through lived experiences. Because the learning opportunities are digital, it means students in face-to-face and online learning environments have similar opportunities. I will discuss the outcomes of trials using these apps

Socially cued developmental plasticity affects condition-dependent trait expression

Condition-dependent sexually selected traits are thought to indicate an individual's quality or breeding value for fitness. Variation in developmental environments, however, introduces much complexity to resource allocation, and therefore, to phenotypic expression. The extent to which environment-specific developmental tactics interact with resource allocation and impinge on the relationship between condition and adult phenotype remains largely untested. Here, we used the black field cricket (Teleogryllus commodus), a species known to modify allocation tactics in response to both nutrition and social environments, to examine whether socially cued plasticity affects condition-dependent trait expression. We reared juvenile males in a 2 by 2 factorial experiment, crossing 2 social environments with 2 diets, and examined allocation toward life-history, morphological traits and costly sexual signaling (i.e., calling) in adulthood. Although diet significantly affected phenotypes during the second-last juvenile stadium, shifts in development rate in response to both the nutrient and social environment during the last juvenile stadium obscured the effects of condition on male phenotypes. Our results suggest that sexually selected signals may be poor indicators of individual quality due to interactions among sources of environmental variance. We suggest that the correlation between trait expression and condition is more complex under natural environments than most literature in this area assume

Multi-Modal Courtship in the Peacock Spider, Maratus volans (O.P.-Cambridge, 1874)

The peacock spider, Maratus volans, has one of the most elaborate courtship displays in arthropods. Using regular and high-speed video segments captured in the lab, we provide detailed descriptions of complete male courtship dances. As research on jumping spiders has demonstrated that males of some species produce vibrations concurrently with visual displays, we also used laser vibrometry to uncover such elements for this species. Our recordings reveal and describe for the first time, that M. volans males use vibratory signals in addition to complex body ornaments and motion displays. The peacock spider and other closely related species are outstanding study organisms for testing hypotheses about the evolution and functional significance of complex displays, thus, this descriptive study establishes a new model system for behavioral ecology, one that certainly stands to make important contributions to the field

Reproductive Foragers: Male Spiders Choose Mates by Selecting among Competitive Environments

Mate choice frequently operates differently for males and females as a consequence of male competition for mates. Competitive interactions can alter the fitness payoffs of choice and the realization of preferences under natural conditions, yet the majority of male choice studies still use binary trials that ignore social factors. Here we test the importance of contest dynamics in male choice using a framework in which females are considered analogous to foraging patches that are subject to competition. We track the mate choices and interactions of 640 spiders (Nephila plumipes) before and after manipulation of competition within enclosures, modeling the expected fitness payoffs of each male's actual choices and comparing these with all alternative choices. Many males choose new mates once social conditions change and achieve higher fitness than predicted under random movement. Males do not simply move to larger females but choose favorable competitive environments that balance competition and female fecundity, thereby increasing their fitness payoffs. Further, we show for the first time that prior-residence effects, which are known to influence male contests, also have a strong influence in male reproductive contests and can shape male mate choice. These results highlight the importance of situating male choice studies in the relevant social context, as intrasexual interactions can have profound effects on the realization and payoffs of male mate-choice strategies

Data from: The active metabolic rate predicts a male spider’s proximity to females and expected fitness

Conspicuous traits, such as weaponry and body size, are often correlated with fitness. By contrast, we understand less about how inconspicuous physiological traits affect fitness. Not only is linking physiology directly to fitness a challenge, but in addition, behavioural studies most often focus on resting or basal metabolic rates, resulting in a poor understanding of how active metabolic rates affect fitness. Here we use the golden orb-web spider (Nephila plumipes), a species for which proximity to a female on the web predicts a male's paternity share, to examine the role of resting and active metabolic rates in fitness. Using a semi-natural experimental set-up, we show that males closer to a female have higher active metabolic rates than males further from females. This higher metabolic activity is paralleled by increased citrate synthase activity, suggesting greater mitochondrial densities. Our results link both higher active metabolic rates and increased citrate synthase activity with fitness. Coupled with the behaviour and life history of N. plumipes, these results provide insight into the evolution of physiological systems

Data from: The social factors driving settlement and relocation decisions in a solitary and aggregative spider

Both ecological and social factors play an important role in determining the structure of animal settlement patterns. While the ecological factors determining animal settlement are generally well known, the relative importance of social factors in mediating fine-scale settlement choices is poorly understood. As a result, we have little knowledge of why individuals choose to settle near specific neighbors. Here we used a web-building spider (Nephila plumipes) that settles both solitarily and next to neighbors within aggregations to examine the specific social factors that influence settlement decisions. Within experimental enclosures we observed the settlement patterns of females pre- and post-male release. This allowed us to compare two models of aggregative settlement in lekking species, the hotshot and preferences models, to examine the relative importance of a female’s phenotype and mate attraction to further dissect settlement and relocation decisions. We show that mate attraction increased with aggregation size, and that larger females were generally preferred, supporting both the hotshot and preference models of aggregative settlement. We further demonstrate that smaller females that attracted fewer males within an aggregation were most likely to relocate. Our results demonstrate how social feedback can affect initially state-dependent settlement decisions, thereby highlighting the dynamic nature of settlement

Maratus volans fan reflectance data

Hyperspectral color measurements on Maratus volans fan ornaments