Education and Outreach
We are always looking to engage, educate and inspire. Be it on campus at the University of Plymouth or away, we love showcasing our world class research to schools, professionals and the general public.
Explore our teaching resource ‘discover osmosis’ or become a part of the research team as a citizen scientist!
Discover osmosis!
Design your own experiment and observe how osmosis impacts the function of microscopic organisms with our online teaching resource.
Discover Osmosis!
Osmosis is the diffusion of water from an area where water is high in concentration to an area where water is low in concentration, across a semi-permeable membrane. The process of osmosis has been flagged as a conceptual challenge in both schools and higher education.
Vorticella similis is a Protozoa and contains a contractile vacuole (aka pump) for regulating water content. We have drawn on this function to develop a new approach to teaching the process of osmosis.
We have designed a ‘Virtual Experiment’ that enables the direct effect of salinity on the process of osmosis to be observed in living organisms at the microscopic level. This resource was presented at the European Marine Science Educators Association conference during an interactive workshop in 2013 to leading educators to high acclaim. Discover Osmosis has also been used in local Devon schools and in undergraduate teaching at the University of Plymouth.
Become a citizen scientist
Citizen science and artificial intelligence
We know considerably little about the effect of climate change on the earliest, and possibly the most sensitive, stages of life.
To address this gap in knowledge, we have used the EmbryoPhenomics technologies to record the development of aquatic embryos under simulated climate change scenarios. We have millions of images of developing aquatic animals. To fully realise the potential of this resource in understanding the effects of climate change on their development we must analyse these physical and behavioural responses.
Manual image analysis is time consuming, laborious and subject to human error. To speed things up and view the phenome in unprecedented detail, we are using artificial intelligence to train a model that will enable the computer to autonomously extract phenotypic data from developing embryos in real time! This will prove to be a game-changer.
Using artificial intelligence to train models require significant ‘training data’ - examples for the computer to learn from - so we have built a citizen science project in partnership with zooniverse.org to harness people power to help us build this giant training data set. See below!
Embryo Cam
Embryo Cam is a Zooniverse project built to generate datasets for training computer models using artificial intelligence for image and video classification. Embryo Cam has two fun mini projects that enable anyone to contribute to this effort by helping to annotate morphological, physiological and behavioural traits in the huge image datasets that the EmbryoPhenomics screening technologies produce. We are then using these datasets to improve the ability of the computer to measure phenotypic traits autonomously and in so doing are helping push the limits of our understanding of how early life stage aquatic animals respond to their environment.
Embryo Feature ID
To extract morphological detail from an image, we ask our volunteers to draw around and identify structures of interest such as the egg capsule, shell and eyes.
Embryos on the move!
To extract physiological and behavioural data from video, we ask volunteers to watch short video clips and select the behaviours they see from the list provided.