On Day Three of the Perot Institute, we began by creating a pooter device. To make this very simple tool of collecting insects and other organisms, we used an inexpensive plastic vial, two plastic tubes, small piece of felt to act as a filter, and multiple rubber bands to hold everything in place. The pooter creates a vacuum where you use your mouth on one tube to create pressure to suck up organisms through the other tube. We took our pooters outside of the Allen STEAM Center to try and collect creatures to identify on iNaturalist.
In the afternoon, we were given a mystery insect and asked to identify it based off our observations. Our group was given a wasp/dragonfly like creature with a super long tail. It had a unique pattern on its abdomen. After consulting iNaturalist, we narrowed down our specimen to the Giant Long Tailed Ichneumon Wasp. This wasp is a parasite who uses the "tail" as its ovipositor to inject its eggs into another wasp's larvae located within trees. After other groups presented their insects, our instructors were nice enough to provide us brownies - made out of crickets! I took a sample and it wasn't bad, very chocolatey.
We spent the rest of the afternoon working as a group on an engineering challenge. We weren't given many parameters, just use engineering to solve a problem whether big or small. We have to present Shark Tank style on the following day. My group had several brainstorming ideas that we tried to narrow down and focus. Tomorrow's post will focus on this project.