I-Corps L to discover a sustainable model that will support and scale BioBuilder's curriculum and teacher professional development activities

Massachusetts Institute Of Technology, Cambridge MA

Investigators

Abstract

BioBuilder is a curriculum and a teacher training program which was established with the goal of bringing investigative curriculum to high school students and teachers. BioBuilder currently focuses on the emerging field of synthetic biology and started its teacher-training program with 27 teachers in 2011. It has grown to now involve more than 500 teachers in 40+ states and 14 foreign countries. Early success has been consistent with a notion that authenticity sparks student interest and teacher engagement, but it is also recognized that teachers are not the sole or most influential voice in curriculum adoption. Despite the early positive response seen, the project needs to better understand the market forces that can lead to a compelling educational product. The goal in participating with the I-Corps L program is to perform customer discovery to explore scaling and sustaining the appetite seen for BioBuilder's programming and teacher development offerings. BioBuilder provides novel and exemplary pedagogical models to the emerging field of synthetic biology and biological engineering. BioBuilder is a teacher-informed curriculum that has been developed to bridge the gap between science classrooms and university research. The goal is to connect the science and engineering done by professionals to the way these subjects are taught in high schools. By presenting authentic research questions in accessible, modular, and teachable form, BioBuilder fulfills its mission to spark interest, engagement and understanding in science and engineering. There is also a series of professional development workshops co-led by a university faculty member and a BioBuilder-trained K-12 educator. In this way BioBuilder can both disseminate its curriculum to a nationwide audience and also foster an engaged community of teacher leaders.