Rethinking Outreach: Teaching the Process of Science through Modeling

Tim Herman,Shannon Colton,Margaret Franzen

doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.0060086

Abstract

h,…you mean if you want to change the amino acid from an arginine to an alanine, you just change the code in that position.” This “aha moment” recently happened for a member of the Brown Deer High School SMART (Students Modeling a Research Topic) Team at a Saturday morning meeting while awaiting the arrival of their scientist mentor. This student had just realized that the process used by scientists to create modified proteins, and to test the impact of that modification on function, involves engineering the gene for the protein, and then expressing the modified gene in an appropriate system. The excitement of this new insight spread throughout the team as other students picked up this new information and began to reinterpret some elements of “the story” that had been told to them by their scientist mentor at a

Highlights

“O h,...you mean if you want to change the amino acid from an arginine to an alanine, you just change the code in that position.” This “aha moment” recently happened for a member of the Brown Deer High School SMART (Students Modeling a Research Topic) Team at a Saturday morning meeting while awaiting the arrival of their scientist mentor
SMART Teams, which consist of a small group of high school students and their teacher, work with a local research lab to design and build a physical model of the protein that is the focus of the lab’s research
The SMART Team program grew out of a professional development summer course for high school science teachers offered by the Milwaukee School of Engineering (MSOE) Center for BioMolecular Modeling

Summary

Introduction

“O h,...you mean if you want to change the amino acid from an arginine to an alanine, you just change the code in that position.” This “aha moment” recently happened for a member of the Brown Deer High School SMART (Students Modeling a Research Topic) Team at a Saturday morning meeting while awaiting the arrival of their scientist mentor. We endorse this approach and believe that the Milwaukee School of Engineering (MSOE) SMART Team modeling program captures many of the Principles of scientific teaching in a high school outreach program by exposing students to the “real world of science” as practiced in a local research lab.

Results

Conclusion