Bioinformatics: The Rutgers Initiative in Teacher Enhancement (BRITE)
Principal investigator(s)
William Sofer
Andrew Vershon
Lenore Neigeborn
Project Location
New Jersey
Website
Bioinformatics: the Rutgers Initiative in Teacher Enhancement (BRITE) is an NSF ITEST Comprehensive Project that involves teachers and their students. BRITE invites high school teachers to participate in, and contribute to, a series of scientific "Challenges" posted over the World Wide Web, the answers to which require using the computational tools of molecular biology, structural biology, and bioinformatics. Over the period of the grant, BRITE will work closely with teachers participating in a Local Project and remotely with teachers who participate in a Regional Project. As a result of their involvement, teachers will strengthen their existing curricula with the tools and resources of information technology. Several thousands of high school students will benefit from their teachers' work in the Local and Regional Projects.
PROJECT ACTIVITIES
- Explore ways to effectively integrate bioinformatics and structural biology into existing high school programs so that it becomes a permanent offering of the science curriculum.
- Offer a four-week summer Institute and continued academic year follow up activities to enhance the science backgrounds and computing skills of high school biology teachers.
- To achieve this, and to model how scientists use information technology (IT) to support their work, BRITE will work with teachers to develop Waksman Challenges. These are problems in molecular biology, bioinformatics and structural biology that teams of high school students pursue using the resources of IT. Challenges will be used for both classroom instruction and evaluation of how comfortable teachers become at integrating IT into their existing science curricula.