Involving Undergraduate Students on Hands-on Activities and Research

The objective of this presentation is to outline the presenter's successful strategies and challenges in integrating hands-on activities and research in undergraduate education in Horticulture. Undergraduate research and laboratory education provide the students special opportunities to understand the subject matter in-depth, to relate what they have learned to potential future careers, and to realize the practical usefulness of what they have learned from textbooks, internet, and the class lectures; and to use their creative potential to the fullest. However, for the teacher, undergraduate laboratory education, and project-based learning modules pose special challenges including limited time to bring the project to a milestone, being not able to use research methods that would involve difficult-to master techniques, and the cost in terms of  time, human resources, and supplies to generate quality research data or educational product. Taking into account these factors, the presenter has devised a long-term research project in breeding peppers. In the "Building Better Peppers" project, groups of undergraduate students participate in generating (a) educational material for both classroom use and public dissemination, (b) collect literature on a specific topic and generate hypotheses to test, and (c) do supervised research collecting data to test hypotheses focused on a single question. Both the long-term sustainability and the use of low-cost technologies are the special features of this project.