Three SE@K students (Ming, Marina and Alex) took part in masterclasses organised by the SMSAS outreach officer, Joe Watkins. For details about master classes and other outreach events at SMSAS see here https://www.kent.ac.uk/smsas/outreach/on-campus.html.

The classes took place on two days and involved four sessions: i) Introduction to probability and statistics ii) Removal modelling, iii) Occupancy modelling and iv) Capture-recapture modelling. They were attended by some of the most enthusiastic and engaged year 9 students in the local area.

All sessions were interactive and the participating year 9 students had the opportunity to replicate real-life sampling techniques for monitoring populations of lizards, penguins and birds. These involved digging for lizards in the sand, looking for hidden penguins and marking birds. No animals were hurt in the process as they were all made out of plastic!