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Program Director:
Dr. Joel Goodman
Professor of Pharmacology
University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas Southwestern Medical School
Pharmacology
6001 Forest Park, Rm ND7.124A
Dallas, TX 75390-9041
2146456139
Joel.Goodman@UTSouthwestern.edu
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The STARS Summer Triathlon is a rich program for high school biology teachers that features training in high school lab exercises, a series of biomedical symposia on basic science topics, and a summer of research at the bench. The program is administered through the office of Science Teacher Access to Resources at Southwestern (STARS) at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School in Dallas.
EVENT 1 of the Triathlon is a 12-day June workshop where teachers will receive training in several laboratory exercises that they can use in the classroom. Exercises will cover Enzymes, Organelles, Photosynthesis and several others. For the later part of the workshop, rising ninth-graders will be invited to serve as "guinea pigs" for the teachers-in-training. Ph.D. students will explain the importance of each lab exercise to their own research. The company Advanced Placement Strategies will help design and conduct these workshops. EVENT 2 consists of a series of Monday evening and Saturday symposia and in-services during the school year. Symposia will be on topics in biomedicine that will be relevant to the high school biology curriculum, such as Viruses, Membranes, and The Liver and will be taught by faculty at UT Southwestern. In-services will feature lab techniques that can be used by teachers, as well as presentation of Virtual Instruments (see below). Activities will also be planned at the Museum of Nature and Science for the teachers and the ninth-grade students from the workshop. EVENT 3 of the Triathlon will be 8 weeks of summer research in a UT Southwestern laboratory. Each teacher will be paired with a principal investigator at the medical school. S/he will conduct cutting edge research aligned with the mentor's research program.
Besides the Triathlon, Virtual Instruments (VIs) and Science Suitcases will be constructed and used in the classroom. Four VIs will be built by biomedical engineering students: Virtual Microscope, Virtual Spectrophotomer, Virtual Gel Box, and Virtual Thermocycler (for PCR). The VIs, which will be available to all biology high school teachers at no charge, are meant to substitute when real instruments are not available in the classroom and also to ease the fear of the unknown that many teachers feel when approaching real instruments. Operation of the VIs are designed to be intuitive to middle school and high school students, and exercises can be scaled to grade level. External funding for the VIs is provided by The O'Donnell Foundation and UT Southwestern Medical School.
There will also be 7 Science Suitcases built. Graduate students from the Biomedical Communications program at UT Southwestern will design these portable displays in collaboration with high school teachers and students, and the suitcases will be built in the workshop and under the supervision of the Museum of Nature and Science. Subjects for the suitcases will parallel the exercises taught in EVENT 1 of the triathlon. Besides physical displays, the suitcases will also include multimedia such as DVDs and webpages. The suitcases will be designed to be intensely interactive.
The STARS Science Triathlon is open to biology teachers from the following high schools of the Dallas ISD: Adamson, Pinkston, A. Maceo Smith, Samuell, Kimball, Roosevelt, Jefferson, Seagoville, Sunset, Madison, Lincoln, and South Oak Cliff. Teachers interested in the program should visit the website at www.utsouthwestern.edu/STARS.
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