Bridging the Gap Between Biomaterials Research and High School Students Using New Advances In Communication Technology

High school students lack the general knowledge and understanding of what biomaterials are, what they are used for, and the potential they have to greatly improve patient care and comfort. Furthermore, these high school students are unaware of what graduate school is, the types of research performed, and how these graduate institutions are the pipelines of ideas and concepts that advance science and technology. This gap between high school and post-bachelor degrees is creating educational voids which may lead to the stunted growth or deceleration of biomaterial innovation. To improve the future outlook and enrollment of graduate students in the field of biomaterials, we have implemented a program connecting high school students from Akins New Tech High School from the Austin Independent School District in Texas and chemical engineering graduate students from the University of Texas at Austin, using new advancements in communication technology.

We designed the project to be educational for both the participating graduate students and high school students. For the high school students, the primary focus was to promote the understanding of— and spark the interest in— biomaterials. The secondary focus was to educate high school students about academic life and how to effectively prepare for their next educational step. Graduate students also benefited by improving their ability to communicate research to a non-collegiate audiences and enhance management skills.

The project was designed as follows. 1) Chemical engineering graduate students developed 2-3 page written summaries of their thesis research, including any embedded visual explanations, appropriate for high school audiences. Subsets of these graduate students were filmed explaining and physically illustrating their research project using a FLip^TM video camera. The short vignettes were compiled to create an introductory video explaining to the high school student what would be their responsibilities and focus on immersion into biomaterials and graduate research. 2) A single research summary was assigned to groups of 3 or 4 high school students for reading and review. The groups collectively generated a series of 10-15 questions focused on the research they read as well as general overview questions on what is and what it is like to attend graduate school. 3) The high school students then used these questions to interview graduate student using skype^TM, an online video chat application. 4) For a final evaluation of comprehension and understanding, the high school students were required to write an essay about this experience and present their understanding of the research project using PREZI^TM, a zooming presenting editor.

At the completion of this program we had 78 high school student participants and 9 graduate student participants. 55 of the high school students were underrepresented minorities, 49 were economically disadvantaged, 16 were English language deficient, and 7 needed special education services. 7 of the graduate students were actively pursuing doctorals in the field of biomaterials. Being the first time this was attempted, it was widely regarded as a success by the Akins High School faculty. It successfully enlightened students about biomaterials and graduate research. As for the graduate students, the online interviews help them self-evaluate their research and the ability to clearly explain research topics to a non-academic audience. This project is geographically independent as it functions on online tools, does not require significant financial support or significant time resources to complete; therefore, implementing this program into current biomaterials research programs can be simple and be capable of outreaching many levels of education including primary and secondary schools as was as undergraduates at collegiate institutions.