Examples of Course Materials

Click on the following links to see examples of my course materials

This is an activity I created for Earth Team during the COVID-19 lockdown to maintain student engagement while practicing science communication. One team created Plant-demic to teach players about the spread of invasive plant species. I used Tabletop Simulator to digitize the game so that students could play it remotely. Link to their game.

Link to climate models & policy lesson plan

Link to ENVS 167: Freshwater & Wetland Ecology Ecosystem Collapse Game

“The food chain linking game was fun and helped visualize the health of the Salton Sea.” - ENVS 167 student

Link to lecture slides on reading and summarizing academic papers

This is an example slidedeck from ENVS 100: Ecology & Society. Read student reviews of my lecture materials below:

“I appreciated learning about how to read a scientific paper and how to break it up. That was something I struggled with and now I feel more proficient in being able to understand and absorb material.”

“Charlie had the best slides! Everything was so clear, from examples to instructions. Having us scale El Capitan to track our progress was awesome!”

“I liked that Charlie made an example or sample on the slides so that I could really see how to do something. For example when learning how to use google scholar she used bigfoot as an example and that kept me engaged and able to understand how to search for my own research.”

How I use technology in my teaching

I incorporate technology into lessons when I feel it enhances the learning experience. I am experienced in a number of different teaching and environmental technologies; I focused my Master’s dissertation on the use of emerging technologies in wildlife conservation and was invited to help establish WWF’s technology group Panda Labs. I was a grand prize winner of Conservation X Lab’s technology prize and heavily incorporated technology into my PhD dissertation. I have incorporated my expertise into my teaching in a number of ways. I use Google Suite for students to co-work on group assignments and encourage the use of Canva for creative assignments and science communication practice. I utilize a number of existing virtual games when appropriate, such as Cornucopia to enhance student understanding of water management decisions in an agricultural context. I have utilized identification apps such as Merlin Sound ID and Plant Snap, citizen science tools such as iNaturalist and Zooniverse, and natural history tools such as MorphoSource and ImageJ. I am also well-equipped to teach with data collection tools, including Li-COR’s Li-6400 and Li-6800 to take photosynthetic measurements, spectrometers to measure plant reflectance, and a variety of environmental sensors using microcontrollers. I have taught soldering for basic circuit design, 3D modeling and 3D printing, and the following coding languages: R, Python, C++/Arduino.

Examples of my student's work

ENVS 100: Ecology & Society Literature Review Paper Link

Kai Ando’s Senior Thesis (link).

Erin Langness’ Senior Thesis (link).

Student Symposium Posters (link).

Undergraduate engineering student Miles Johnson explaining our Cactus-electricity Harvesting Prototype (video link)