Community Events
Kaleidoscope Science’s Community Events have two goals:
Gauge participants perspectives of transdisciplinary approaches to outreach
Increase public awareness of the importance of scientific research of all types
To date, we have worked with grant groups, natural history collections, and individual researchers to create meaningful and effective community outreach. We have a longstanding collaboration with the Rocky Mountain Herbarium (RM) to conduct outreach events geared toward informing the local community about the many important services the herbarium offers beyond just research.
In addition to running our screen printing activity, we also assess whether our approaches are successful through surveys and short answer questions, and have seen promising results!
Below are the preliminary results from two of our most important questions:
I can explain what an herbarium is.
Herbaria are only useful for people who study plants.
These questions are given in a pre/post Likert survey, where a score of 1 means they Strongly Disagree with a statement and a score of 5 means that they strongly Agree with the statement. The first column are the scores for before the activity and the second column is for those after.
Pre and Post results for the statement I can explain what an herbarium is.
Pre and Post results for the statement Herbaria are only useful for people who study plants.
These graphs show what we hope to see—that participants are polarizing to Strongly Agree for being able to explain what an herbarium is, and Strongly Disagree to the statement that herbaria are only useful to people who study plants.
We have conducted these events at festivals, in our University of Wyoming Makerspace Wyrkshop, and are in the process of taking it to more community events.
If you are interested in teaching your community about your local herbarium, botanic garden, or research, please reach out!
