By Katie Trapp, Web Editor
On a recent hot and humid Wednesday afternoon, 16 middle, high school and community college science teachers donned hard hats and orange vests and embarked on a tour of the North Carolina Research Campus construction site in Kannapolis.
These teachers, from schools all over the state, were together for a weeklong introductory biotechnology workshop, which included a field trip to the Research Campus.
Since its inception in 1987, 1,460 teachers from around North Carolina have participated in the North Carolina Biotechnology Center’s summer workshops. Ever since biotechnology was added to the state’s Standard Course of Study for high school biology classes in 2003, teachers have sprinted for the opportunity to participate in the workshops.
Each workshop is hands-on and includes wet and paper labs, lectures and field trips, such as visits to the Research Campus and to the GlaxoSmithKline zebrafish facility that educators can use with their students.
“The reason we recommended the workshops go to the North Carolina Research Campus is just so they can see how important biotechnology is to the North Carolina economy,” said Bill Schy, education and training program manager at the Biotechnology Center.
The Biotechnology Center offers workshops to North Carolina educators throughout each summer.
“These workshops are beneficial because they give teachers, and by extension their students, the opportunity to understand the relevance of what they’re studying in class,” Schy said. “The tools of biotechnology can cross many industries – biotechnology has applications in pharmaceutical discovery and production, diagnostics, agriculture, forestry and environmental protection.”
The Biotechnology Center gives participating teachers free lab supplies and allows them to borrow lab equipment and educational videos.
“Teachers tell me all the time that the students love using the scientific equipment borrowed from the Center because they’re doing the things real scientists do,” Schy said.
Workshops held this summer included Introductory Biotechnology, which covered basic scientific concepts and techniques in biotechnology, as well as how to teach these effectively, and Genomics and Bioinformatics, which covers key technologies supporting genomic science, and applications of this science in medicine and agriculture.