Support Learn.Genetics!

For more than 30 years, the Genetic Science Learning Center has been making easy-to-understand science content and fun interactive activities to teach high school and middle school students. Our site, learn.genetics.utah.edu, is kind of like an online science museum. We have places to learn and places to play. Millions of students around the world learn science using our freely-available activities.

But anyone who’s visited a science museum knows how disappointing it is to walk up to a hands-on activity or touchscreen and find that it’s. . . broken! Instead of something to inspire and enlighten it’s just a dark box.

Our “museum” has some broken activities too. Many were built in Flash, a web multimedia technology that stopped working in 2021. We continue moving forward, funded by grants, to develop new content. Unfortunately, those grants haven’t provided the funding to go back and fix our nonworking interactives.

Teachers tell us they want these interactives back! One in particular, about a fish called the three-spine stickleback living in Loberg Lake, is central to a unit about natural selection and traits. It gives students a hands-on experience with how scientists really do their work - the students record observations and use data to make conclusions.

Check out what this activity used to look like, and what students can learn from it, here: https://teach.genetics.utah.edu/content/evolution/selection/#dataCollection

Teachers say:
Save Loberg Lake! It’s so central to the DNA and Unity of Life materials.
The interactives are great to use for students who can work alone on different topics.

With your help we can bring this fundamental activity back! Your donations will support restoring the full functionality “Loberg Lake Stickleback Data Collection” in an updated, supported format.

Help us give a hand to hardworking Biology teachers around the country. Your gift will have impact far beyond the University of Utah and benefit more and more high school students every year.