Here are a few examples of courses and assignments the DDS has collaborated with:
Environmental Storytelling
Course: BIO7 Global Change Biology
Assignment: In teams of four, students create a StoryMap on an environmental biology topic. The story must engage in the science of the topic and find ways to make complex ideas accessible.
Course: Bio 243: Topics In Molecular And Cellular Biology
Assignment: Increasingly, short videos on social media are used by scholars to share articles and contribute to discourse, in communication both with other experts in their field and with the general public. For this assignment, each student will pick a recent biology journal article. Using the graphs from the article, each student will create two one-minute videos of themselves explaining the article and its significance, one for a scientific-peer audience and one for an audience of their family and friends. Videos should be captioned.
Video Remix in Children and Media Studies
Course: CSHD167 Children and Mass Media
Assignment: In groups of 3 or 4 students make 5 minute video remixes using a excerpt provided. The goals for the video remix are: 1) To show how race/ethnicity/gender/age have been used to portray otherness, but how they might be portrayed more equitably in children’s media 2)To find visual/aural ways of teaching children about stereotyping in media, 3) To demonstrate how shifts in editing can affect storytelling
Assignment: In groups of 3-4 students make a 10 minute podcast as a final project. The podcasts are written for a general/non-scientific audience, but they are an in-depth exploration of a technical scientific paper on one of the mass extinctions. The goals for producing podcasts are to research a narrow mass extinction related topic in detail, practice science communication, and have fun.