Center for the Engineering of Living Tissues (GTEC)

GTEC Student Provides Leadership to Undergraduate BME Tissue Engineers

David Simpson is a video star-at least in the eyes of biomedical engineering undergraduate students enrolled in Systems Physiology I: The Cell. David is presently a third-year PhD student in biomedical engineering, working under co-mentors Dr. Sam Dudley at Emory and Dr. Robert Nerem at Georgia Tech in the Georgia Tech/Emory University Center for the Engineering of Living Tissues (GTEC), an Engineering Research Center. After serving as a teaching assistant with Dr. Barbara Boyan last year, David was enticed to take on the role of lead TA in her course this year. The TA team had begun the process of reorganizing the laboratory associated with the course to better reflect advances in cell and tissue engineering and to provide a more problem-based engineering approach to cell biology.

David recognized that success in the lab depended on the undergraduate students being able to succeed in using technical skills employed by biochemists routinely, but for which the undergrads had little previous experience. The problem was made worse by the growing number of students registered for the course, which reduced the amount of personal supervision that any one TA could provide.

David wrote, produced, and acted in a series of "LABMAN" videos to teach the most important of these skills. Each video is 8 minutes in length and shows in step-by-step fashion how to do simple, key techniques needed to complete the lab. The videos are captivating in a "Saturday Night Live" kind of way, so they hold the attention of their intended audience (even of Dr. Boyan!). David made some other changes as well. He deleted some of the less essential experiments to make room for a problem-based assignment, giving the students an opportunity to use their new skills in an independent manner. In addition, he instituted a rubric for grading laboratory reports that enables the TA team to equilibrate their assessment of student achievement across the different sections of the course. David personifies the many positive and innovative ways that GTEC reaches into the classroom at Georgia Tech.

To learn more about this topic:
Visit th eGeorgia Tech/Emory Center for the Engineering of Living Tissues (GTEC) at http://www.gtec.gatech.edu/research/index.html

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David Simpson, author, producer and
star of the "LABMAN" video series.

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Last modified: April 3, 2007