BioJam Camp for Teen Engagement in Biomaking: A Pilot Co-Design Case

• In Event: The Biomaker Ecosystem: Technologies, Spaces, and Curriculum for K–12 Making With Biology

Abstract

Biomaking is a growing area in synthetic biology learning that places emphasis on creativity, exploration, personal expression, and play (Author, 2019a). In many ways it is an extension of maker paradigms that emphasize engagement with digital artifacts (Peppler et al., 2016; Halverson & Peppler, 2018). While prior efforts have emphasized the affordances biomaking might have for learning, many of those approaches are undergirded by instructionist stances, where learners engage with activities that have been previously designed on their behalf. Typical examples in life science include activities where learners carry out procedures developed by others in order to prove or learn a concept (e.g., Author, 2019b). While these efforts represent important steps toward creating access to complex topics in synthetic biology, they leave out the important perspectives of students, whose personal experiences, cultures, and interests have been shown to afford important learning and engagement benefits (Ladson-Billings, 1995). These perspectives have shown to be consequential in sustaining participation among learners traditionally underrepresented in science fields, namely socioeconomically disadvantaged groups, girls, and black and brown learners (Brown et al., 2019).

We address this using perspectives in co-designed education, where learners themselves participate in the design, development, and implementation of a learning experience. We report on a pilot co-design (Riikonen, 2018; Aksela, 2019) implementation of the BioJam Camp (2020), a teen summer camp that explores biomaking. BioJam was co-developed with a group of seven teens (all females, ages 14-17 and grades 9-12) who leveraged their own creativity and culture in biomaking and used it as a pathway to share in local communities. Activities are anchored in physical construction kits delivered to participants and are supported with online meetings and asynchronous learning days.​ The kits include such biomaking resources as biomaterial recipes, circuitry components, and live mycelium. We address the following ideas: (1) what trajectories did co-designers take in developing BioJam Camp—and what affordances emerged in doing so, and (2) how did the co-design approach create opportunities for learners to engage in activities that were personally and culturally relevant?

Our anecdotal findings suggest that co-design in BioJam camp occurred across two main pathways: collaborative reflection on ways to improve upon the camp programming, and re-imagining the program content shaped for broader audiences. We found that teens were afforded opportunities to explore activities and content with an explicit invitation to critique and reimagine how they would engage peers and their community with these topics. In addition, we observed that the biomaking focus on biomaterials sourced from local environments and using food grade ingredients from markets, created opportunities for teens to bring their expertise of neighborhood and culture into imagining community biomaking workshops. These early observations suggest that a co-design approach provides an important opportunity to create those personally and culturally relevant learning experiences that have been shown to be quintessential in the maker ethos and, importantly, providing equitable learning. Future work should consider how to leverage the BioJam model to develop learning materials in other informal and formal learning spaces.

Authors

• Corinne Takara, Okada Design & BioJam Camp

• Rolando Perez, Stanford University

• Callie Chappell, Stanford University

• Jonathan Hernandez