About seventy high school students from Atherton Jr/Sr High School are participating in a new curriculum from “Health in Our Hands (HiOH): Mystery of the Monkeyflower.” Mystery of the Monkeyflower is a 10 - 12 week, NGSS-aligned, project-based learning unit for high school lifescience. Students use a monkeyflower plant experiment and a graphic novel developed to learn how traits evolve over time through natural selection. The plant experiment is based on the research of Dr. David Lowry, plant biologist at Michigan State University, who is studying how different environments affect the development of different traits in the population of one species of monkeyflowers (Mimulus).
During their weekly visit to Ms. Lauren Jones Science class on February 23, 2022, the HiOH team observed students excited to share how they measure their plants and record the data they collect in numbers and drawings. This activity is part of Lesson 3 - How do the parts of the monkeyflower work together to keep the monkeyflower plant alive? Dr. Hildah Makori and Dr. Consuelo Morales answered students’ questions about making measurements and recording the data collected from their observations of the Monkeyflowers.
