IGEM Outreach:Introduction to Engineering Projects
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Introductory Engineering Group Projects
- Suitable for: high school students who want to explore engineering
- From the Cornell 2011 iGEM team's volunteer work for Cornell's CURIE program
CURIE is a one-week summer program for high school girls who are interested in science and engineering. These girls were invited to Cornell to gain experience in a laboratory working on research-inspired projects. These projects were designed to exercise their ability to problem solve and troubleshoot as they worked towards their goal. Cornell iGEM lead the “Bio Boot Camp” session on the first day of the program, teaching the students basic lab techniques (pipetting small volumes, plating bacteria, running a PCR gel) as well as showing them some of the equipment in the laboratory. During the week that followed, Cornell iGEMers worked as teaching assistants with small teams of students on the following group projects:
- Microvascular Chips
- Wireless Combination Lock
- Sleep Apnea Feedback Device
- Protein Localization in Mammalian Cells
- Sun Tracker
For instance, the Microvascular Chips group used a microfluidic chip to model blood flow in small capillaries. They measured baseline flow speeds by taking videos through the laboratory’s microscopes, and calculated the resistance in each channel from the flow speeds and channel diameters. Then they plugged one channel to simulate a blood clot and measured the changes in flow speed and channel resistance. Using resistance as an analogy for an electrical circuit, students then calculated the flow speeds that they expected to find based on simple physics and compared their findings to expected results. This project was framed in the context of modeling a small stroke, but it could be also used to model many biological systems involving blood flow in small capillaries.
