Note: Start with the problem and introduce the team

Researcher 1: “Hi, I’m Elizabeth Abrahams and I’m the lemur’s keeper! For a long time we’ve struggled with having our visitors be able to see them due the large size of our exhibit and the small size of our lemurs.”

Researcher 2: “Hi I’m Darren Minier here at the Oakland Zoo. We were looking for ways for the lemurs to be more engaged with their environment. We asked one of our past interns at Sonoma State University to help us solve this problem.”

Researcher 3: “Hi, I’m Karin Jaffe. I’m a Professor at X. I’ve been studying animal behavior for over 20 years. Along with my graduate student Penny and my husband we’ve designed a smart feeder device that for the lemurs without zookeeper presence.”

Researcher 4 (Penny, graduate student): “Oakland Zoo actually came to us. They wanted to get their lemurs moving more and being more active in a visible spot. We as a team came up with this.”

Visual: Show the device

Karin explain how the device works

Penny: The lemurs are often just sunning, but they aren’t running around and foraging. If they were in the wild they would be running around looking for food.

Karin: We need 8 devices, so that there are lots of places the lemurs check for food. It also allows us to change the devices to feed the lemurs on an known and unknown timeframe: predictable vs. unpredictable.

Penny: I’m collecting baseline data at the moment. We’re going to start with 100% of the device predictable so the lemurs know when they will be fed. We will go from 100% known to 75% all the way down to 0% which will make the feeding times entirely random. During each phase I will be collecting data.

Penny: Our hypothesis is that as we as we change the devices to release food at more unpredictable times the lemurs will becomes more active. We’re also hoping that the visitors will enjoy the exhibit more. We’re going to measuring the visitors’ stay times which is how long they pay attention to the lemurs.