The Gatsby Charitable Foundation, which funds plant science research in the UK, established Gatsby Plants as a National Teaching Facility for Plant Sciences 4 years ago. The project has received continued funding until 2011.
Gatsby Plants aims to enthuse undergraduate students to study plant science further through two initiatives which expose them to the exciting developments in plant science and the scientists leading this research. These are:
- an annual Summer School for high-achieving 1st year undergraduate students from UK Universities
- a Teaching Resource providing plant science lecturers with access to novel and inspiring teaching material
Very worthy. I’ve been having a look at the teaching materials in particular. You need to register to get access.
The majority of materials have been kindly contributed by members of the plant science research community (see Terms of Use for how to credit their efforts). Gatsby Plants has also negotiated access to material from some commercial organisations and is actively involved in generating novel content.
There’s a number of lectures with definite agrobiodiversity interest, for example one by Prof. Peter Beyer, University of Freiburg, Germany on “Golden Rice on a Mission” and another from Dr Peter Craufurd on “Crop Science for Development: A Journey from the Laboratory to Farmers’ Fields in the Tropics.” And another: Prof. Monique Simmonds of Kew entitled “Plants in our Lives: from Beauty to Death.” You get a video of the lecturer delivering the talk, with accompanying slides. If you want your students to view the lecture you contact Gatsby Plants and they send you a username and password which allows access to a URL.
You also get practicals (there’s one on pea genetics), images and movies.
I would imagine they could be very useful to trainers, although I must say it would have been nice to be able to also download the presentation and adapt it to one’s particular situation and audience. Anyone out there with training resources on agricultural biodiversity to share? How about on CWRs, for example?