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The past three years have been an intensive growth period for the BioBridge organization by expanding its original scope of developing cutting-edge laboratory kits and teacher professional development to now support 3 biotechnology production centers, a science leadership society for over 500 motivated high school students, and a county-wide Science Festival reaching over 70,000 participants.
BioBridge has continued to support the implementation of novel laboratory kits in high school biology classrooms with an expanded repertoire that includes an enzymes lab in addition to the transformation and protein purification labs. Activities in the areas of microbial discovery and respiration were piloted and will likely be expanded in an after school science interest group setting.
The BioBridge four phase teacher training was further refined (with additional support of a DOE IES grant) allowing a full research team to observe classroom lab implementations. Preliminary results validate the effectiveness of the training model incorporating high school student leaders and student/teacher partnerships as a key pedagogical feature. Additional funding has allowed BioBridge to expand its reach to teachers beyond Sweetwater in San Diego Unified and Oceanside districts and from disciplines beyond biology.
To support the production of these laboratory kits, BioBridge piloted a Biotechnology production center at Castle Park High (CPH). Expanding from their inaugural class of 8, the 2008-9 year tripled to include a total of 25 students. In addition, BioBridge and CPH successfully developed a 250K grant to support the Science Innovation Academy which includes a total of 2 Biotech courses. Based on this success, SciTech High School, located in the San Diego High Complex, launched a second biotech center with two classes. Mira Mesa High school is launching a 3rd site in 2009/10. The BioBridge team now facilitates the interface of teachers running these centers to facilitate community, teamwork and system redundancy. For the 09-10 school year, sites plan to produce all transformation, protein purification and enzyme kits allowing the BioBridge team to focus attention on new activity optimization.
Beyond the classroom, BioBridge has refined its Science Leadership Society in collaboration with HHMI funded undergraduate grant (HSP). To this end, over 500 high school and 100 undergraduate and graduate students are engaged in an interactive community around science, leadership and community at events such as Science Gone Wild and Pharmacy Day.
Finally, BioBridge took on the challenge to co-facilitate the inaugural San Diego Science Festival. By partnering with over 200 organizations from all areas of San Diego County, the SDSF produced ~500 science interactions to reach over 70,000 members of the general community. In addition, BioBridge teamed up with the MIT museum, UCSF and The Franklin Institute to support the development of a national network of science festivals in the aforementioned cities and beyond.
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