Avida-ED Active LENS Workshop Applications Being Accepted

There are still spaces for more teams of two each at the 4th annual Avida-ED Active LENS Workshop at the North Carolina A&T University in Greensboro, North Carolina, June 14-16, 2018, so the application deadline is being extended. Travel and expenses will be covered by the workshop sponsors for educators wishing to learn how to use the Avida-ED artificial life program in teaching evolution.

From the flyer:

Avida is a digital evolution software platform used to study evolutionary processes, and harness evolution to solve engineering problems. Avida-ED is a free, user-friendly, browser-based version of Avida developed specifically for educational purposes, with a graphical user interface and visualizations that allow the user to observe evolution in action. (See http://avida-ed.msu.edu/ for more information.) Organisms within this software are self-replicating computer programs, competing for computational resources supplied by the environment. Their replication is imperfect, resulting in mutations in some of their offspring, which may alter the ability of those organisms to make use of their environmental resources. Populations studied over the course of generations therefore display all of the elements necessary for evolution by natural selection: variation, inheritance, selection, and time.

A link to the application is in the flyer.

Disclosure: I was formerly part of the Avida-ED project (2008-2009), and my spouse, Dr. Diane Blackwood, is the current software architect for Avida-ED.