For four days every week Boston University’s CityLab program turns ordinary teenagers into scientists using interactive workshops to give middle and high school students an appreciation of biotechnology techniques and equipment.
CityLab’s laboratory, located on the BU Medical Campus, allows science classes to work with advanced biotechnology equipment. For schools that cannot make the trip, the program offers a mobile laboratory, MobileLab, that brings CityLab’s curriculum right to nearby Massachusetts schools, CityLab Director Donald DeRosa said.
“The students get the opportunity to work in a real lab,” DeRosa said. “None of it is pretend or make-believe.”
The program’s curriculum includes six experiments that explore “compelling and meaningful” topics, DeRosa said. In the workshop “The Case of the Crown Jewels,” students use DNA analysis to solve a crime, and in “The Mystery of the Crooked Cell” students explore the molecular basis of sickle cell anemia. A few other labs include genetically engineering bacteria to make it glow and testing hypothetical patients for HIV.
The different experiments allow the students to handle equipment their schools do not have access to, DeRosa said. Around 6,000 to 7,000 students participate in the program each year.
The CityLab program was launched in 1992 with a grant from the National Institutes of Health. Carl Franzblau, associate dean of graduate medical sciences and CityLab co-founder, said he helped create the program as a way of giving back to the community.
“We wanted to expose students to science,” he said. “We are trying to give them a stimulus that says science is fun and that you can do it.”
The mobile laboratory component was added in 1998, according to a fall 2007 National Center for Research Resources article. MobileLab is a 40-foot science laboratory on wheels that can hold up to 24 students.
“We asked, ‘Why not make this opportunity available to students who can’t come to CityLab?'” DeRosa said.
Colleges around the country – including Georgia State University and the University of North Carolina – have followed CityLab’s lead and designed their own mobile laboratories, Franzblau said.
MobileLab also has a partnership with BioTeach, a program with the Massachusetts Biotechnology Education Foundation that gives grants to provide schools with new biotechnology lab equipment, BioTeach program coordinator Christy Redfield said. Under this agreement, MobileLab travels to the schools that have received grants, helping teachers learn how to incorporate the equipment into their curricula.
Redfield said the MobileLab spends two to five days at each school, making sure both the teachers and students understand the equipment.
“The teachers take what they have learned and teach that year after year,” Redfield said.
The different CityLab programs are designed to introduce students to what happens in a real biotechnology lab, CityLab educator Colleen Mackey said.
“It’s a neat way to present conceptually difficult ideas,” she said.
Mackey, who has been with CityLab for three months, said she is one of four educators who teach at CityLab. She said she enjoys working with different groups of students, and hearing what they have to say.
“Everyday is different,” she said. “The kids have some really inventive ideas.”