Last night, I got a text message from my kid’s middle school science teacher, Bertha Vazquez. She’s a hell of a teacher, and she’s also a huge fan of Richard Dawkins–particularly because of how effective he is at making evolution make sense. Some time ago Bertha told me that she was working on a project with Richard to create a project designed to provide teachers with better tools for teaching evolution in the middle-school curriculum.

The project has now been launched! The mission of Teacher Institute for Evolutionary Science (TIES), a project of the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science, is to teach “middle school science teachers the most-up-to-date concepts of evolutionary science.” They have plans for workshops, web-based tools, and the quantitative measurement of learning outcomes. It’s a brand-new endeavor, and you can read more here.

You can watch a video introduction of TIES here.

If you want to make a donation (which the Louis J. Appignani Foundation will match dollar-for-dollar through the rest of 2015), visit the TIES fund-raising site on RocketHub.