Rob Pringle’s students explain ecological challenges through video
Conveying science to a broad audience in a way that is understandable, accurate and entertaining is an important — and challenging — task.
Last semester, Princeton University students in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology got a chance to try their hand at that skill, creating animated short videos that focused on a wide variety of ecological challenges.
For their final projects, they were divided into small groups to translate a local environmental issue, such as extinction or species invasions. Students decided what information to include in creative and informative videos.
This was the second time that Robert Pringle, an assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biology, taught the class. The first time, the final projects were more conventional, with written reports and PowerPoint presentations.
This year, said Pringle, “we wanted to try something a little different.”
“The students were good at seeing the big picture. I think they had good intuition for what is the essential background, and what is too much information,” he said. “I was very impressed with what the students accomplished for this project. And they seemed to enjoy it.”
— Rob Pringle, Quoted in Princeton University News
Video by Jonathan Choi, Victor Pomary and Raymond Wu
“The Bog Turtle,” about a local endangered species, is one of the videos produced by students in the class “Ecology: Species Interactions, Biodiversity and Society.” (Video by Jonathan Choi, Victor Pomary and Raymond Wu, Princeton University)
Video by Aaron Ladd, Katie Grabowski and Renata Diaz
The student-produced video “Colony Collapse Disorder” is about the recent phenomenon of bee colony collapses. (Video by Aaron Ladd, Katie Grabowski and Renata Diaz, Princeton University)
