Building a Better Mouse Box
One of my joys in life is sharing knowledge. My hope is that by talking about what I’ve learned over the years, I can inspire others to make their own discoveries and recognize their own talent and skills.
Which is why I absolutely love presenting to students. Whether it’s giving a college seminar on the need for humane wildlife population control or coming up with a hands-on project for middle schoolers, there is nothing like talking science in the classroom.
So when Amy Dries of Sinagua Middle School in Flagstaff asked me to chat with her woodshop students, I was all in. In fact, I already had a problem for them to tackle:
I wanted them to build me a better mouse box.
Notice I said a box not a trap
In order for us to disperse fertility-control technology in the wild to help stem the overpopulation of rodents, we need feeding stations where mice and rats can eat up the food containing the formula.
So we asked Amy’s seventh and eighth graders to design and build a prototype of a feeding station for mice.
They whole-heartedly embraced the idea, and what was supposed to be a two-day project turned into a week’s worth of brainstorming, preliminary designs, presentations, testing, feedback sessions, and lots of building with wood.
We took all 15 designs and field tested them in the backyard, then brought back the data to the kids. Ultimately we selected two of the most promising prototypes with us to Isabela Island in the Galapagos archipelago to field test them there. And they worked!
There were a few big moments from this partnership with the students of Sinagua Middle School that will always stick with me. The first is how enthusiastically the students took to this project, particularly because they knew their designs might actually be put to use in the field.
The second was the reaction of the farmers in the Galapagos, who were so impressed that a group of middle schoolers thousands of miles away wanted to help them as they move from poison to humane fertility-control methods to deal with rodent overpopulation.
And the last is what Amy shared with me not too long ago.
“The collaboration with you last semester really boosted my morale and confidence about how much our community cares about our students,” she said. “It just gave me an appreciation for how much people are willing to share their knowledge. Because being able to show students the real-life applications of what they are learning is the whole point.”
We are looking forward to meeting up with the woodshop students of Sinagua Middle School this spring to show them video of how well the mouse boxes worked.
