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• Our biggest challenge is providing all of our programs following the destruction caused by hurricane Ike in 2008. Work has finally begun on our building and the completion is expected in a little over a year. Other areas of the campus have been largely restored to pre-Ike condition this year which has provided more space for us to use for some programs. We continue to utilize a variety of spaces to accomodate our programs including: UTMB campus, partnering institutes of higher education, and local schools. We are continuing to rent space off of Galveston Island to store our training materials and supplies. Our summer STEM Quest Camps and some teacher workshops are being performed in temporary lab space which is significantly smaller than the teaching lab space we had in our building. This has caused us to have to adjust the number of participants to match the space available.
• Since hurricane Ike, our staff is no longer located together in the same building (housed across campus) with our materials and supplies. With a limited staff and many different HHMI funded programs to implement, there is a decreased ability of the staff to assist each other compared to pre-Ike conditions. To overcome this, we have built a pool of volunteers to assist the program staff with different activities. This has included high school students from area high schools (service clubs), retired faculty (alumni), current faculty, graduate students, people from the community, retired teachers, and active teachers as viable sources of manpower to help us achieve our program goals. The help of these volunteers has been instrumental in our success.
• Reaching a larger number of educators across our state with our professional development for teachers and to provide experiences for students. For teachers, we have incorporated a combined approach to minimize out of class time. Workshop content in provided online before the hands on laboratory experience and the follow up is through Skype or Adobe Connect. For students, we have developed a realistic virtual lab experience which will be available this fall to enable students to perform experiments based on a case study.

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