In this project, called BioKIDS, our goal is to adapt a website, the Animal Diversity Web (http://animaldiversity.ummz.umich.edu) for use in teaching science to 5th and 6th graders.  The website is a very large encyclopedia of the natural history of animals that has been put together largely by student authors using a template and other tools we provide.  Because it is both structured and queriable, it is a wonderful resource for teaching by "inquiry" methods, that is, teaching by guiding students to discover for themselves fundamental patterns and principles of ecology, conservation biology, and evolutionary biology.  We want to make it available for elementary education as well as for college students and the general public. To adapt our web materials for science instruction to 5th and 6th graders, we are working with a team of faculty and students from the School of Education to reformat text for a younger audience and to create interesting and fun activities for kids that teach them how scientists think about the world.  The result will be a series of classroom activities that combine the Animal Diversity Web with field experiences.  The first of these activities will be tried in local schools starting this fall, but within a few years we expect to be providing materials to a nationwide audience. 
Student Tasks and Responsibilities : We are looking for help in several areas.  First, we hope to find UROP students who can help us modify the natural history information currently on the website to make it more appropriate and interesting to a younger audience.  This will involve writing and library research.  There may also be opportunities for students with programming skills to help create templates and scripts to streamline the "translation" process.  We also are looking for students who are interested in writing "species accounts."  These accounts, written for a general audience, describe the natural history of individual species of animals.  Writing them involves doing research both in the library and on the Web.