Rethinking Outreach: Teaching the Process of Science through Modeling

“O h,...you mean if you want to change the amino acid from an arginine to an alanine, you just change the code in that position.” This “aha moment” recently happened for a member of the Brown Deer High School SMART (Students Modeling a Research Topic) Team at a Saturday morning meeting while awaiting the arrival of their scientist mentor. This student had just realized that the process used by scientists to create modified proteins, and to test the impact of that modification on function, involves engineering the gene for the protein, and then expressing the modified gene in an appropriate system. The excitement of this new insight spread throughout the team as other students picked up this new information and began to reinterpret some elements of “the story” that had been told to them by their scientist mentor at a previous meeting. Their mentor’s story about the tumor suppressor maspin and its role in metastasis was now becoming “their story”—as they began to truly understand not only what the maspin protein was and how it functioned, but also the process of science whereby their mentor had designed an experiment that resulted in the data that supported the story. And the story was becoming all the more compelling because the students had in hand a physical model of the maspin protein they had designed and built using rapid prototyping technology (see Figure 1). There has been a recent call for undergraduate faculty to engage in “scientific teaching”—a way of active teaching that places equal emphasis on both the process of science and the facts of science [1]. We endorse this approach and believe that the Milwaukee School of Engineering (MSOE) SMART Team modeling program captures many of the principles of scientific teaching in a high school outreach program by exposing students to the “real world of science” as practiced in a local research lab. SMART Teams, which consist of a small group of high school students and their teacher, work with a local research lab to design and build a physical model of the protein that is the focus of the lab’s research. During this modeling project, the students learn that science is much more than just the facts documented in their textbooks. They see that science is a process whereby real people— undergraduates, graduate students, post-docs, and principal investigators— go about learning something about a molecular world invisible to the naked eye. And in the molecular biosciences, what they are learning can be pretty amazing. While experiencing the culture of a research lab, SMART Team students begin to imagine themselves in the roles of their scientist mentors. The SMART Team program grew out of a professional development summer course for high school science teachers offered by the MSOE Center for BioMolecular Modeling. In this course, “Genes, Schemes, and Molecular Rethinking Outreach: Teaching the Process of Science through Modeling