Difference between revisions of "Team:UC Davis/Project"
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Revision as of 23:19, 17 September 2015
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Sources: |
Continue scrolling to read more or click here to advance to the next section! |
Continue scrolling to read more or click here to advance to the next section! Sources: |
Continue scrolling to read more or click here to advance to the next section! Sources: |
Continue scrolling to read more or click here to advance to the next section! Sources: |
 1. "Know Your Footprint" Lesson Plan 2. Antimicrobial Awareness App |
 Continue scrolling to read about our design process or jump to the lesson plan material! We were particularly inspired by Greg Neimyer’s Black Cloud initiative and identified students as an impressionable audience and a lesson plan as a viable medium. More specifically, we wanted to develop a lesson plan to be used in conjunction with our biosensor. Our objective was two-fold:
To aid us in our development of a lesson plan, we reached out to Community Resources for Science (CRS), an organization that works with scientists to bring their work into the classroom. CRS helps educators and scientists work together to engage students in hands on, inquiry based learning experiences. Their mission is to, “connect and engage educators, students, and scientists in a vibrant and innovative web of science learning resources, thereby transforming science education.” Sasha Stackhouse and Morgan Seag at CRS provided valuable feedback on:
Once we got the approval that our lesson plan met their standards, CRS connected us with their network of teachers in Davis. While we are excited to share our project/message with schools in the area, delivering the instructions ourselves somewhat limits our scope. Ultimately we want to reach students around the nation. To better understand how we could refine our lesson plan to allow for wider distribution, we spoke with Ann Moriarty, an AP Biology/biotechnology teacher at Davis Senior High School. Ms. Moriarty has a background in research herself and propounds the value of hands on activities in engaging students. In her classroom, for example, students develop an appreciation for biotechnology through running protein assays and performing gel electrophoresis to verify that their restriction enzymes cut the plasmid in the right location. Ms. Morariaty provided valuable insight on the considerations that go into developing a lesson plan- the most salient being the constraints imposed by lack of funding and teaching to a curriculum. Closely linked to the issue of funding The first obstacle is funding. The school budget is variable, teachers fill out a petition, and the process can take as long as a year. This piece of insight further emphasized our need to drive the cost of our assay down. For example, in the first iteration of the lesson plan, the activity involved taking a field trip out to a local body of water where students would collect a sample for measurement. Ms. Moriarty raised some obstacles ___, for example: what happens to students who don't want to go on field trip? Who is going to cover the cost of a substitute teacher, transportation costs, insurance? In sum, field trips are a logistical nightmare. So we brainstormed a work-around. Why not have students go out and collect water samples from their local environment as a pre-activity assignment? Not only did this circumvent the difficulty of organizing a field trip, this also gave students a sense of ownership - a sense of individual responsibility that we had previously identified as an important factor in a successful civic engagement initiative. The second obstacle are the constraints imposed by teaching to a curriculum. Ms. Moriarty talk about the tight schedules associated with teaching to a curriculum. However, the AP Biology curriculum is __ into four big ideas and that The College Board recommends two lab activities per big idea. We identified AP Biology standards that the lesson plan could fulfill, allowing our lesson plan to be more easily integrated into an AP Biology curriculum:
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