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NATALIE KULDELL: So we are among friends,
please call me Natalie, please interrupt me as I go.
Elizabeth has given a very nice framework for-- the high level
questions about this next little bit of time
are things about creating a scalable educational
experience, and things like that.
But truth be told, this is really
going to be me, my dirty laundry,
telling you all the mistakes I've
made in developing something that I thought seemed
like a good idea at the time.
How's that as the sort of tag line for this talk?
It seemed like a good idea at the time.
But maybe, just so that you don't go running from the room
and think this is going to be all disaster,
I will start by showing you where this has ended up.
Because where all this meandering and mistake-making
has brought me is to something that I'm actually
pretty proud of, and that seems to be reasonably useful.
I don't think this is the final form of what this will take,
but let's start with where it ends up,
and then we'll rewind the tape and go from the beginning
to get it back to here.
So BioBuilder is now a nonprofit organization
that I am founder of, I have a wonderful board of directors
that help protect me and my time,
and help me make good decisions about protecting just thinking
through the business questions, and the strategic questions,
and the wisdom questions that are involved in running
a nonprofit organization.
It came about because I thought that the teaching I was doing
here at MIT, in the Department of Biological Engineering,
was such a great way to teach and to learn.
I was having so much fun drawing on current research questions
from the department, and using the questions that
existed to teach the engineering,
and using the engineering to teach the science behind it.
So I'm a scientist by training, not an engineer.
In fact, I didn't really even appreciate
the distinction between science and engineering
until I got to MIT 12 years ago, or something like that.
I really like learning about how the world works.
What I discovered when I got here and started
teaching this way to the undergrads
was that, by building stuff made from biology,
you learn a lot about how it works.
And so I really just wanted to more broadly distribute
that content to students who wanted to learn this way,
and to teachers who wanted to teach this way.
Pretty simple-- not that wise, maybe,
but that's what I've organized this around.
And so there is a nonprofit organization that
is called the BioBuilder Educational Foundation which
has, as I say, a board of directors, partners,
we have publications and newsletters and things
like that.
We are a 501(c)3, and we were founded in 2011.
The funding for this organization
came from the National Science Foundation.
They awarded MIT, Harvard, Stanford, UC Berkeley,
and UCSF-- a consortium of five institutions--
10 years' worth of funding.
From the NSF, that's really unheard of.
And I thought, as the educational director
on the East Coast for this, with 10 years
of funding we could do something really, really cool.
And so what that started with were
animations, which is why I'm here talking to you today.
What those animations have been connected into
is a curriculum for students that
has a number of hands-on laboratory activities.
So for example, this one is for students.
These bubbles that are here link to the animations,
but the content that's on the website
is some introductory content, laboratory procedures,
lab report information, and then a portal for sharing your data
once you've collected it.
There's also a teacher's component to this website,
so that teachers, if they wanted to start teaching this content,
would have classroom materials like PowerPoints
to introduce the content, videos about introducing
synthetic biology-- which is what the focus of these labs
are-- and then components for the lab
introductory PowerPoints and things like that.
So this is a website that has information
about the nonprofit organization,
it has curricular content for the students-- which are mostly
high school students and some college students--
and then it also has a portal for teachers.
We run teacher workshops in the summers
to train teachers how to teach this in the classroom,
and how to teach other teachers.
Yes?
AUDIENCE: So one of the things we talked about yesterday was
this notion of a video being something
more than the experience of just pressing play and finishing it,
that a video is meant to spark an ending, that
is the conversation that happens on comments on YouTube--
we focused a lot on YouTube and social-media based video.
What is, I guess, the ending or the goal-- or what's
your vision what an ending looks like for things
like BioBuilder?
And what's your user pipeline?
Because for us, we're talking a lot
about people who are exploring the internet
and finding things that spark their curiosity
or love of learning.
I would imagine that something like BioBuilder,
you have a very focused pipeline that's maybe more looking
at classrooms?
NATALIE KULDELL: So the distinction
you just made between the focused pipeline
and the user exploring through the internet,
is a distinction that I did not know
when I started this project, but that has become really clear.
So the pipeline for this is really
intended to be formal education setting--
so I don't know if when you took high school biology,
you took advanced placement biology or something like
that, there are this series of lessons and labs.
And these are intended to fit squarely into formal education
settings, where teachers have content that they need
to cover, hands-on labs that teach techniques as well
as investigative questions, and then writing
and points to communicate their work.
Originally-- and maybe this is a good segue
into to how this really started-- this was my notion.
I don't know if you've ever seen this website-- I'm sure many
of you have-- BrainPOP.
This was what I thought the animations were
going to fit into.
This is kind of the explore the internet
depending on what you're curious about
kind of sense of the animations that are in BioBuilder.
So cellular life in genetics-- and maybe
in watching cellular life in genetics, a person
would get interested in something
in particular-- cloning, or whatever.
And so this is a very rich library of animations
that a person can self-navigate through, and learn content
that they're particularly interested in.
And I imagined, when I started this project,
that I would build a library of videos that looked like this.
That is not where I have ended up.
That was, in fact, really misguided.
Yeah?
AUDIENCE: My question is-- you're in the kind of structure
and giving this to students and teachers,
how do you choose what to pick as a--
NATALIE KULDELL: As a topic?
Right, so I work with high school teachers
every summer to decide on the topics.
The very first thing that the high school
teachers I've worked with told me was that they did not
have more time in their day to teach other stuff,
but that they did feel that they could
teach what they were teaching in a better
way, in a more effective way.
And they thought engineering was a great lens to teach biology,
in particular, and these current research questions.
AUDIENCE: And they're giving you the concept that has to be
covered, and you're coming up with the example that--
are they saying, it would be nice if we could use this
example for--
NATALIE KULDELL: So it's more of a partnership
than that, because what I'll do is I'll say,
here's a really interesting system that
has an ongoing question associated with it-- how do
you reliably engineer a cell?
How do you improve gain in a system?
Something like that.
And they'll say, oh, well, you know,
I don't really know much about that topic,
but I have always had trouble teaching photosynthesis.
So is there a way that we could teach that question
and cover photosynthesis.
So I'll say, well, in a plant cell, we could do it this way.
So it's more of a give and take--
what they have challenges teaching,
and what are the ongoing research
questions in this field.
So this kind of BrainPOP kind of meandering
through a library of videos is what
I imagined I would be creating at the beginning
of this 10-year NSF funding.
What I had not appreciated was how long
it takes to make each video, how hard it is to make each video,
and how bad I am at making each video.
So let me just walk you through the very first video
that I made.
So in preparation for this conversation,
I went back to some of the earlier stuff that I had done.
And I'll tell you that the characters that
are in these videos started with the characters that
were-- these are all animated videos, they're all animations.
And the characters who are in them
started with this comic strip, which
appeared in the journal, Nature, in 2005.
So this was the launch of some of the interest
around the field of synthetic biology.
There were some splashy papers in Nature,
as well as this comic strip, and it
shows the adventures of a woman in the lab named System Sally,
and a boy who's just super curious named Device Dude,
and Buddy, who is this little green blob in the middle there.
And it's a really fun comic-- I like comics a lot,
I grew up with Spider-man.
I love comic books.
And I like this one until it gets
to the really hard content.
So right at the fold here, right at the midpoint,
it starts to talk about engineered genetic devices.
And I'll pass this around.
There's a lot of content here, Boolean
logic gates, ribosome binding sites--
you have to be an expert to understand
what was going on in that comic.
So my naive thought was, I would take these characters--
because they were very popular, people really liked them--
and I would have dialogue between them
to explain these ideas, rather than have them
on the page with just bubbles and question marks and things
like that.
So in a very lucky way, It turns out
that my college roommate's husband
runs an animation company.
So that's how I got connected with animated storyboards.
They gave me a very nice discount
on what they would do in terms of these animations--
it was still expensive.
But this was the transition that was made.
So the comic book turned into this website,
which was BioBuilder.
This was the very first iteration of the website.
And it had, on the left hand panel,
the idea was there would be science animations, engineering
animations, technology animations, things like that.
And like BrainPOP site, you would enter that,
and there would be a whole library of animations
that you could explore.
In the end, I don't have enough years
to live to populate the site.
It takes so long to make each of these animations--
it would take me forever to really populate
the site for visitors to self-navigate through the topic
areas.
So this was the original idea.
Then I started working with a teacher,
and the website changed to look more
like this-- where the animations were
put into a formal context of activities,
there was also a link where you could go directly
to the animations, if you just wanted to watch the animations.
So this was sort of the transition period, where there
was both a library of animations and activities
that you could do, if you wanted to teach with these animations.
There were also single-page comic strips-- so
returning to what was originally the unsuccessful version--
single-page comic strips that set up each of the laboratory
activities.
And this was the transition to, then,
the third version of the website, which
I showed you at the beginning.
So let me show you, since you're working on animations
of your own, let me show you some of the detail, some
of the things that went into building that very first--
well, let me show you the first animation I did.
How about that?
I'll show you what these animations look like,
and then I'll show you some of the fun and the choices
that went into making this animation in particular.
Does that sound like a reasonable plan?
AUDIENCE: This would be a great review, because on Thursday,
Josh from [INAUDIBLE].
NATALIE KULDELL: Great, great.
[VIDEO PLAYBACK]
[BUBBLES]
-Dude , no running in the laboratory.
-Sorry, Sally-- but have you heard about this competition?
It's called iGem, and I think my bacterial bubble could totally
win this year.
-I thought you were done with bacterial bubbles.
And what do you know about iGem?
-Um, not much, except that there's going
to be a bunch of losers and me.
-I don't think you understand the nature of this competition.
iGem-- the International Genetically Engineered Machine
Competition is a way to get young scientists
and engineers working together to engineer biological systems.
-Working together?
Where's the competitive spirit in that?
The dude works alone, that way the dude gets all the credit.
-You need to be a member of a team to join iGem,
and you need a professor to lead it.
-But I heard it was a student competition.
-Well, yes, the competition started in 2004,
based on an undergraduate class developed at MIT in 2003
for their short winter session.
And it continues to be an undergraduate experience--
but not without guidance and support.
Last year, there were more than 30 teams
who competed from all over the world.
-So that's my competition?
That's a lot of people.
-A lot of people all asking the same question--
can simple biological systems be built
from standard interchangeable parts,
and operate in living cells?
Or is biology simply too complicated
to be engineered in this way?
What do you think?
-Biology is not too complicated for me.
-The goals of this competition are
to enable systematic engineering of biology,
promote open and transparent development of tools
for engineering biology, and help
construct a society that can productively
apply biological technology.
-OK, I got a lot of work ahead of me.
If we're not going to use my bubble idea,
what else is possible?
-Maybe a better question would be, what isn't possible?
-OK, so first off, what's your standard interchangeable
part be?
Actually, what parts exist?
Do we have to make those?
-You'll probably need more than one,
but the registry of standard biological parts
is a great resource, with lots of parts already designed.
And if we make parts of our own, we
should add them to the registry, in case
other teams can use them, too.
-And help other teams?
What kind of competition is that?
Of is that how so many teams got cool projects going last year?
Pleasant-smelling bacteria, a bacteria nightlight,
a DNA drug delivery system-- I heard one team even
made up bacterial freeze tag.
To beat those, we should get started right now.
-All right, well let's brainstorm for a little while
before I have to get back to work.
How does that sound?
-Great.
Can you show me this registry?
Maybe we can find some good parts to use.
-Good idea, Dude.
Let's start there.
This is where you'll be able to search.
-Oh, wow!
[END VIDEO PLAYBACK]
NATALIE KULDELL: All right, so that, for better or worse,
is probably the best video that's on my website.
And you know, it was done several years ago,
it still holds true.
So in some ways it-- it still very accurately describes iGem.
It has some old screen shots of the registry
and things like that, but you know,
it was done five years ago and I think
it holds up reasonably well.
It was fun to make, so let me show you some of the fun things
that were involved in making it.
One thing was the script.
So the script was written by a former undergrad of mine
in biological engineering, and she did a summer UROP with me,
and wrote some of these scripts.
And then it was edited by a woman
who's on my board who is also a screenwriter.
And this just shows you some of the edits that were
involved in that short script.
"Dude, no running in the lab.
Sorry, Sally, but have you heard about this competition?
It's called iGem.
I think my bacterial bubble could totally win this year."
And she deleted, "I don't much about it,
but someone gave me a flyer for it."
So there were a lot of deletions and edits on the text, itself.
And if you like writing, and if you
like this kind of sentence level work,
this is actually pretty fun and creative.
I'm not very good at it, but I think it's fun.
The other part that I would say was
pretty fun was-- oh, before we did the storyboarding actually,
we did-- where are those pictures?
Maybe it's here.
Yeah, so the company that did these animations
sent me pictures of people who were posing
in ways that they thought they would
be using in this animation.
And I got to choose which little boy I wanted
to be Dude in these comics.
So I don't remember which one I chose, but these are all
shots of actors that they have who
come in and pose in ways that they would think
might fit the script, and then you
get to choose which one they're going to base the image on.
I also got to choose voices, and I have an early read-through
here that--
[AUDIO PLAYBACK]
-My bacteria bubble could totally win this year.
-I thought you were done with bacterial bubbles.
What do you know about iGem?
-Not much, except that there's going to be
a bunch of losers, and me.
[END AUDIO PLAYBACK]
NATALIE KULDELL: So that was a quick read of one
of the candidates for the voices and stuff like that.
So that was kind of fun to work with them
to choose actors who were doing the still
shots, and the voices, and things like that.
And then they did the storyboarding
for this animation, which I had never done before.
They were very talented at-- they knew where to break it up
and which shots they'd use.
And in watching that video now, and honestly
I don't watch these videos regularly,
so it's interesting to see a couple things that I think
still work reasonably well.
I think it's short enough, it doesn't go on and on--
so could be a little bit shorter,
but I think it's pretty interesting.
I think it zooms in and out of a reality
scene and a non-real scene.
And it covers the questions they have.
There's a little bit of lingo and secrecy to it
that's not as easy to understand,
if you don't already know iGem a little bit.
But I think it answers most questions that people
would have about iGem.
Yes?
AUDIENCE: Why did you choose to do animations rather than film
a real woman with a boy?
NATALIE KULDELL: I think I was misinformed,
that I thought animations would be quicker and easier.
And then I also had that BrainPOP idea
in mind, and this comic strip in mind,
which had Buddy, this sort of bacteria thing,
as one of the characters.
And so I didn't think a puppet or something would make sense.
But that does lead me to a mistake that I made.
And again, if I knew then what I know now--
who's my audience for this?
I mean, would high school students watch this?
I don't think so.
I think it's too young for high school students, and too old
for middle school students.
It kind of doesn't have-- frankly, I
show it to my undergrads, so I was like, I'm OK with that.
So maybe it's OK for MIT undergrads,
but then it doesn't really have a great audience mark.
And the high school teachers who are now using them,
it's pretty rare.
I mean, they may assign them to people
to watch the night before they come in
and start the discussion on synthetic biology,
or start their iGem team, but it's not something
they show in the classroom.
Yeah?
AUDIENCE: So what was the intent behind making it?
Because we talk a lot about what is going to be your what, why,
and how questions before you make a video.
Was it to make something that was
instructional for people who were already interested
in iGem?
And if so, what you made you want
to do a video over a comic book, for instance?
What was that initial interest?
NATALIE KULDELL: I thought-- why are there all the words listed
in the dictionary?
My goal was to actually make like a Wikipedia
of synthetic biology, covering the relevant topics
through animation.
So I wasn't being selective-- I had to choose something
to start with.
iGem was my first, because it seemed to really capture
some of the unique features of synthetic biology,
and was explainable in a way.
It's a discrete entity, not too technical or anything
like that, that I could cover.
But it was really intended to be encyclopedic, not targeted
to an area that I wanted to cover--
except synthetic biology.
When I started this project, people
were coming to me for learning materials
about synthetic biology, and some of those people
were people in government and policy, some of them
were biologists wanting to learn engineering, and some of them
were engineers wanting to learn biology.
And I was not going to make a comment
book, or a different way for each of those populations
to learn.
I guess my thinking was that through self-navigation
through animations, people could learn
what they wanted to learn.
But what it requires is a really rich library
of animations to look through.
And this took me a full summer to do,
and I just don't have that much time.
I mean, I would need hundreds of animations,
and I just didn't have time.
Then, to top it off, when the teacher finally came to me
and said, I can't teach this way.
There's no narrative to using these.
I need a hook, I need a something
that introduce to my students.
It has to fit into a framework.
That's when starting with the research
questions in the field, and using these animations
to support the background that you
learn to do the investigation, just seemed
to make a lot more sense.
So if we look back to the website,
and we go to the student side, we
can look at this one-- what a colorful world.
So now the bacterial growth curves animation is here.
I did, I will say, introduce another character,
Izzie the iGemmer-- she's Latina,
somebody said you should have a little diversity.
Anyway, again, it has all kinds of probably rookie mistakes
that you guys will never make, thanks to your course
that you're taking now at IAP.
But this is the idea, is that now these animations don't
stand on their own the way like BrainPOP does,
and you sort of meander through them.
Now they're part of the background material
you can look at and read and understand,
in order to do some biodesign, or some experiments
about transformation of bacteria to different colors,
and things like that.
Were there are other-- tell me what would
be relevant for your work here.
-OK, I was thinking that since you work so well
with the high school population, if you could orient
these guys a little bit, since you work so well with teachers
and the students, understanding that age range.
Right before you work with them, which
is our target audience, what are some science concepts
that those kids-- like what do they know?
It wasn't that long ago that you were that age,
but you've done a lot since then.
You probably forget.
Meeting with the sixth graders would probably
be very informative to think about, oh, what do they know,
what don't they know?
But maybe it would be helpful, since you have a better
understanding of what's taught when,
for them to have a sense of-- say
sixth grade is kind of our target,
what do those kids know, and what don't they
know about science?
AUDIENCE: Sorry, if I can add one more thing,
it's really important because even if-- I mean,
I had you guys meet with the sixth graders today,
but that doesn't mean that your videos should be talking
to a ten-year-old, right?
Because that's really the basic knowledge
base of the average public view, that they're
not really going to remember the science
that they learned beyond middle school or high school.
So don't mistake understanding an audience of sixth graders
as thinking that it's an audience of ten-year-olds,
that you're talking to them like they're 10.
Because the person who watches Myth Busters,
and the person who goes to vote on certain policies,
they're going to share a knowledge base.
So that's why I think it's important to orient yourself
to that audience.
NATALIE KULDELL: So in terms of what folks know and don't know,
where this content currently is positioned
is to fit into the formal frameworks
that most high schools teach for biology.
In particular, the advanced placement biology classes.
And the reason for that is that, because their laboratory based,
you really kind of need particular equipment,
you need time in your day to do this kind of stuff
with them-- if it's a hands-on lab activity--
and so the advanced placement curriculum has that built in,
and you can make some presumptions about what's
available, and what isn't, what sorts of basic knowledge
they have.
At the high school level, generally speaking,
there's good abstract thinking.
You can think about things that you can't see and understand
what's going on with them, without actually having
to either manipulate them directly, or visualize
them, have them right in front of you.
At the middle school level, I don't know that that's true.
And I will say there is a BioBuilder junior site that's
quite fledgling, and not as robust as this,
but that there's great interest in it.
I mean, you can see the in sixth-- they're awesome,
these middle schoolers.
They're so curious, and they really want to do stuff,
and they're not, oh, I don't like science,
and oh, I never got that.
Or they're not already turned off in some ways,
they're very open to new ideas.
What's hard, I think, is the abstract thinking.
So when I tell, in this lab in particular,
that's here, which is an experiment which
brings DNA into a cell and turns the cell different colors.
And the scientific question here is, does it
matter what cell type you're using
to get different levels of color expression?
So like the chassis in which you're
running this genetic program, what's the impact of that?
It's a very important question in the field
of biological engineering-- what cell
are you going to choose to run your program in,
and how do you choose it?
This is a typical transformation experiment
that many schools do with their students,
but usually schools are doing it just as a demonstration.
What are you going to do with a middle schooler
when you say to them, well, when you add salt to the cell,
the membrane gets porous, there are tiny holes in it,
and the DNA can sneak through?
They have to buy it.
So some of the middle school teachers are doing acting out--
they have students stand in a circle
and hold hands, and say, OK, now salt's added,
and have some of the kids let go.
And so I think working with teachers
who know their audience has been, for me, critically
important in making this any kind of success that it is.
And I continue to really value their advice.
They know what works with their students and what doesn't.
And these animations, some of them use them,
but I think they mostly use them as homeworks, not as ways
to have students discover what they want to know
about synthetic biology.
AUDIENCE: That's going to be really important, because some
of you guys have authentically more
concrete topics than others.
Because ships are something that you can see.
Computer programming is not.
So you guys, some of you will have more abstract concepts,
are going to have to really work hard to figure out,
how do you make that concrete enough so
that a kid, who developmentally can't grasp an abstract concept
as easily as someone a bit older-- how do you
make that with metaphor, with acting,
with all these different things?
How do you use your communication tools
to make something that is maybe a reach
outside of their developmental conceptual ability,
but is still accessible to them.
AUDIENCE: And I will say it's that, as a case study
it's very interesting.
So when the MIT K12 Videos program started,
it was originally allowing students
to create full videos on their own without production.
And I'll have to show you this slide, maybe
after Natalie's talk, but when you
let MIT students decide what they want to make,
just let them do it free-reign, almost 70% of the videos
were physics.
It was alarming, the overwhelming majority.
And it's because physics is a very visual, very tangible
topic.
And when you go online, a lot of science videos and a few
are physics-based.
Maybe one was on electrical engineering.
And the electrical engineering ones were about circuits,
so again, you could see the parts.
When we started producing Science
out Loud, the one video that went as popular-- in order
of magnitude, at least-- and the view count [INAUDIBLE],
that's a different discussion.
But the one that did the best on its own
was the one that I marketed the least.
I literally just posted it to YouTube,
and sent one Tweet about it.
And it was one on how computers work.
And I don't know if you've been in the Stata Center,
but there's this machine called the [INAUDIBLE]
which explains how switches count in binary,
as the fundamental component of the computer.
And people loved that video, and it
showed this desire and this innate need
for a way to visualize these super abstract concepts.
And the fact that things that fulfill that need just
don't exist right now.
It's very hard to find a good video on programming.
It's very hard to find a good video on biology, actually.
Anything microscopic-- it's hard to create something that's
visually engaging, to where you really justify
making a video out of it.
If you ask yourself, why would I make a video
about microbiology, when it's so much more clear and so
much more engaging to write a blog post about it?
And so are the challenges that come along with it.
And these are very good questions.
They're very good mindsets to have
when you approach those ideas.
AUDIENCE: And Elizabeth had a really--
we had a really interesting conversation with those girls
about what computer programming concept was actually
most interesting to them.
What we realized was that all of these ideas
were really big ideas.
The binary is such a narrow topic,
that is allows you to flesh it out in great detail
to show-- for the different types of learners
who are out there-- different ways
to access that information.
So the challenge is to pick a topic that's
narrow enough, that in five minutes,
you can really unpack it and pack it back up again.
And really targeting our audience to figure out what do
they know, and what don't they know,
so that we're hitting that sweet spot where it's interesting,
complicated, but not so complicated that I
can't-- it's too much for me.
AUDIENCE: Jaime's original pitch was almost six minutes long.
And it was about how does a computer work?
That was his original idea.
And so it hit upon switches.
It hit upon talking about binary and on semi-conductors
and all these things.
The switches part is literally less
than a sentence of his pitch, and that
is what we ended up exploring for five minutes.
We had so much to say about it.
I do think the more focused a video is,
it can be a lot more powerful.
Somehow it makes it more dense.
Having worked with this age group myself,
I remember sixth grades learning basic biology--
just so you guys can orient yourselves.
Seventh grade is learning basic structures, typically,
like how to build a bridge, and how to keep
something physically standing.
Fifth grade is-- I'm trying to think backwards.
Eighth is-- chemistry.
So just so that you guys have a sense of where
they are in their learning, they're
really sticking with physical things
until they get a little bit bigger,
and can conceptualize chemistry.
They're not even ready, yet, to think about that
until about eighth grade-- is like 14.
NATALIE KULDELL: So maybe in the last just minute or so,
I'll show you another video that's not very good.
But that does really speak to this question
of how I'm trying to visualize something that is microscopic,
and what we did with animation to try to accomplish that.
And we won't look at all of this.
But we'll get to the microscopic part.
[VIDEO PLAYBACK]
-Dude, I like what you built there.
What's it do?
-Oh, hi, Iz.
This is a cool bug-- I made it using in an electronics
building kit that Sally got me.
She wanted to get me a genetics kit,
but nothing's available yet.
Eesh-- I don't get it.
Why is it so easy to turn on and off
the lights for this electronic bug, but so hard to turn things
on and off in biology?
-What do you mean, Dude?
The arsenic sensor that we built in bacteria
a few years ago works pretty well.
If there's arsenic in the water being tested,
the sensor turns on.
And when arsenic isn't in the water, the sensor is off.
And we built that sensor with natural biological parts.
-So arsenic works like this switch?
How is that possible?
How does the cell know?
-We used parts from the ArsR operon
to program arsenic inducible expression.
-Hold up, arsenic inducible expression?
What's that mean?
All I know is that arsenic is toxic.
Don't the cells just die when you poison them?
-Cells have to come up with a bunch of clever ways
to survive.
In the case of arsenic, the cells
make a pump to get the poison out
as soon as any comes inside the cell.
-So asser is the pump.
-Dude, be careful how you say it.
The protein is called ArsR, since it's
the arsenic repressor protein.
And ArsR isn't the pump-- it just tells the cell
when to make the pump.
The operon has a promoter, which is where the cell's RNA
polymerase binds.
And at least three genes, ArsR gene,
which encodes the repressor protein,
and the ArsB gene which encodes the pump,
and the ArsC gene, which encodes an enzyme that
reduces arsenic in the cell, so it can be pumped out.
-Oh, OK, right.
[END VIDEO PLAYBACK]
NATALIE KULDELL: OK, so you get the idea.
It just goes on from there, and it
talks about how you build an inverter by moving
the repressor and the promoter in different spots,
and manipulate the DNA.
But you can see with this one, you
know there was some physical object
that we were trying to use to illustrate what a switch does.
But then when you get down to that DNA level,
and you're talking about proteins binding to DNA,
and names of open reading frames and stuff, it's just deadly.
I mean, I can't even watch it and I know this stuff.
So I guess it's a real challenge-- it's a hard thing
to think about making tangible, making evident, things
that are not.
But I do think there's a great power through storytelling,
through animation, through video that you have,
and when it's done well it's really very, very
effective, and very memorable, I think is the big part of it.
Are there any other quick questions?
Yes?
AUDIENCE: What is the criteria element of the idea is too big?
When you're brainstorming, trying to find out ideas.
Is there communication of when-- because I think, after today,
we won't get to see the sixth graders anymore.
AUDIENCE: Well, you have us and each other.
AUDIENCE: I think the litmus test
that I used when producing Science Out Loud-- I didn't
mention this yesterday, but it was probably the first thing
I should've said.
Because there are no best practices established
in this field, take everything that we
present to you in class with a grain of salt. And [INAUDIBLE].
So what I've found with distilling
a big idea is that when I'm scripting with a student,
and we start to go down a rabbit hole, so we're saying,
well what is a computer made out of?
Well, I have to talk about a switch.
Then I have to talk about binary.
Then I have to do this.
And we have somehow found ourselves
down a rabbit hole that is tangential to the core topic
at hand.
That's always been an indication for me
that the core topic is too big.
And you examine the branches that
are possible from that core topic,
and start looking at, well, what can I do from a branch, itself.
We can talk about this more-- because I
know Natalie has to leave.
Does anyone have any final questions for her?
Her email address is on the syllabus.
NATALIE KULDELL: I'd be happy to talk.
AUDIENCE: Yeah, I was curious, I guess
you worked with the sixth grade, and many different teachers.
Are they conflicting advice that is being given you?
NATALIE KULDELL: Yes, but I think
that's because teachers teach in many different settings.
And so what is true in one setting is false in another.
There are some schools that won't show YouTube,
that have that site blocked.
There are other teachers that teach every day with YouTube.
So it's just every teaching setting is really--
there's a wide range of--
AUDIENCE: Somehow you never get to make a decision--
AUDIENCE: Standards are the same.
NATALIE KULDELL: Yes, right, so what they have to reach.
AUDIENCE: It may be different where you are, but at least
here, in public settings, and in some private settings,
the teachers have uniform goals that they
each have to achieve in each academic year for each student.
And it's a national standard in public schools
that all sixth graders must do these big topics.
And so within that, how to teach those,
that's the common thread in that.
NATALIE KULDELL: Yes, right.
But in terms of using animation-- so the question
I thought was more related to the tone of the video
that you're making, and that is hard,
because teachers have very different students,
and teachers are very different people, one from the other.
Some are very comfortable teaching
with animated characters, some think that it
undermines their authority.
And I've heard both.
So it really-- for better or worse,
I tend to just make a decision and go with it.
This goes back to if I knew then what I know now.
I think small, smart steps is really the only way
to figure this out.
Anyway, and with that, I really do have to go.
And I'm sorry, but I'd be happy to talk
with you guys offline, OK?
Thank you.
AUDIENCE: Thanks.