The goal of this project is to make these remarkable embryos readily accessible through development of inquiry based lessons, available on a freely-accessible, open access website. Students can then move beyond the early embryo, and explore how scientists study sea urchins to understand larval development and metamorphosis, community ecology, pollution in the marine environment and biological evolution.
The Virtual Urchin project was conceived and first implemented under the auspices of an NSF grant from 2004-2009 by Principle Investigator Professor David Epel, sea urchin biologist Dr. Jason Hodin, acclaimed teacher Pamela Miller, educational technology specialist Dr. Camillan Huang-Voss and talented media specialists David Cohn, Phil Ecker and Colin Trousdale.
Much of the original research highlighted on our site was conducted in Dr. Epel’s laboratory at Stanford University’s Hopkins Marine Station. Additional funding during our initial development period was provided by Stanford University and the Center for Ocean Solutions.
In 2009, the Virtual Urchin team partnered with ocean acidification specialists Professor Michael Thorndyke, Dr. Sam Dupont and educational researcher Geraldine Fauville at the University of Gothenburg and the Sven Lovén Centre for Marine Sciences. Together, we produced the highly-accessed Our Acidifying Ocean activity, based upon published research by Prof. Thorndyke and Dr. Dupont, among others. This work was graciously supported by the Wallenberg Global Learning Network under the auspices of the Inquiry-to-Insight (I2I) project [now superseded by Inquiry to Student Environmental Action (I2SEA)].
At around this same time, Professor Charles Ettensohn, Professor of Biology at Carnegie Mellon University, partnered with Virtual Urchin, when the National Science Foundation (NSF) granted funding both for his research on sea urchin embryos, and for an outreach project now posted on the Virtual Urchin site as Analyzing Gene Function.
Additional funding for the project came through another NSF Research grant awarded to Professor Brian Gaylord (Bodega Marine Lab of UC Davis), Dr. Matt Ferner (SFSU and SF NERR), Associate Professor Christopher Lowe (Hopkins Marine Station of Stanford) and Dr. Jason Hodin (University of Washington's Friday Harbor Laboratories). We used these funds to produce the new Surfing to Settlement tutorial and game, launched in early 2018. Finally, the Michael and Patricia O’Neill Fund kindly provided additional support, and we used a portion of a Royalty Research Fund grant to Dr. Hodin to make further site improvements in 2018, and move the site to the University of Washington server.
2021 MAJOR UPDATE. Through NSF EDGE program funding to Gary Wessel (Brown University), Stephen Watts (University of Alabama–Birmingham) and Andrea Bodnar (Gloucester Marine Genomics Institute), we have now completed conversion of all but of the modules on the site to HTML5 programming, and hence full mobile compatibility.
Also under the auspices of these NSF EDGE funds, we are undertaking a major update of the Analyzing Gene Function tutorial and virtual lab in HTML5, to be launched in early 2024.
And finally, with additional funding from the NOAA Ocean Acidification Program to Dr. Hodin, we launched an updated and now mobile-compatible version of our popular Our Acidifying Ocean tutorial and virtual lab in HTML5 in early 2021.
Dr. Jason Hodin is now the project director for VirtualUrchin. The technical lead is David Cohn, providing the on-going programming, graphic design and interactive design for Virtual Urchin, and oversaw the website redsign. Our logo was designed by Stephanie Ashby.
