| The NSF-funded Synthetic
Biology Engineering Research Center (SynBERC) has partnered with the Saturday
Engineering Enrichment and Discovery (SEED) Academy, a free program for
underserved high school students in Massachusetts, to design and teach
an eight-week biological engineering teaching unit. Though based
at the University of California, Berkeley, SynBERC works with institutions
throughout the U.S. and as far away as Korea to further the NSF’s goal
of improving education and outreach to communities that are under-represented
in the sciences, in order to expand the future pipeline of professionals
in science and engineering fields.
For two years, SynBERC graduate
students worked with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), which
organizes the SEED Academy, to design and teach the program for the high
school students it serves from Boston, Cambridge, and Lawrence, Massachusetts.
The biological engineering teaching unit is also now available for wider
use on the OpenWetWare wiki, a site for researchers and others working
in biology and biological engineering to share information, know-how, and
wisdom.
In 2009, the graduate student
instructors identified and focused on the top three “must knows” of synthetic
biology, connecting these ideas to labs, and designing lesson plans that
teach students how to construct and conduct the experiments that lead to
discovery and opening their eyes to the possibility that they are capable
of hatching the next big idea. The SEED Academy’s mission is to increase
the number of traditionally underserved students in the pipeline for the
technical workforce, so this new teaching unit is a perfect fit for helping
achieve that goal, especially given the Boston area’s concentration of
biotech startups, mature companies, and academic and research institutions. |
