High schoolers don’t often get to see what real science is being done every day by researchers. Worst case scenario is that they are dealing with abstract numbers that don’t have any real-world parallels.
But with the help of Dr. Thomas Luhring, assistant professor of biological sciences at Wichita State, students will not only get to work with active data acquired by a real scientist, but the data will also have implications in their neighborhoods.
The opportunity comes through Galactic Polymath — a platform developed by Dr. Matt Wilkins in 2021 to help bridge the gap between scientists with classrooms — and Luhring’s NSF CAREER grant. The platform is now home to a module, free for all teachers to use in their curriculum, on data literacy, which allows students to explore and analyze real datasets to practice their skills.