This educational traveling trunk program provides classroom teachers, scout leaders, homeschool groups, and families with tried and true lesson plans and materials to explore the management of the endangered Pallid Sturgeon in a very real and engaging way.
Missouri River Scientists brings a place-based curriculum about the Missouri River to your classroom. This program reached the classrooms of over 750 Mid-Missouri students in 2022.
In 2022, trunks have been to the following schools:
Spring 2023 saw an additional 365 Mid-Missouri students dig into the story of the Pallid Sturgeon.
Thank you to the schools who participated in Missouri River Scientists Spring 2023:
We are so excited to share that our education programs made their first peer-reviewed journal! In 2022 our research on the “Missouri River All-Stars Program” now called “Missouri River Scientists: Traveling Trunk” was featured in the “Science and Education” Journal!
This article is called “Promoting Young Learners’ Nature of Science Views Through Place-Based Socio-Scientific Issues Instruction”. We can’t share the article directly but we did screenshot some of the abstract, and discussion. Big thank you to Mizzou: College of Education, Ben Herman, Sarah Poor, and Tanner Oertli for showing how place-based teaching about the Missouri River can leverage students’ sense of place and augment their classroom experiences in ways that help them understand the nature of science and engage local socio-scientific issues.
One of the highlights of our trunks is the pallid sturgeon replicas. These pieces were created in hopes of making the issue the students are studying less abstract and more concrete.
A special thanks go to the maker of the four pallid sturgeons, Joshua Knuth. He is a taxidermist and 3D artist who was able to create our pallid sturgeon replicas by 3D printing 13 individual pieces and hand painting them in order to get the final product.
If you would like to see more from Joshua, click here.
Thanks to our generous sponsors for supporting the Missouri River Scientists traveling trunk program and the creation of place-based education resources for our community. Also, thank you to Sam Stukel and US Geological Survey - CERC for allowing us the use of their photos.