Zero to Genetic Engineering Hero: A Value-Creation Model for Designing Enabling Tools for K–12 Biomaking

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

Abstract

A bottleneck of scaling biomaking education and skill-building in K-12 is the inherent challenge in providing schools and teachers with the tools and expertise needed to access and leverage these contemporary areas in life science (AAAS, 1998). This would require, for example, a dedicated biomaking educator workforce on the order of hundreds of thousands. This is not easily attainable both from the standpoint of training and budgets. We address this challenge by creating accessible low cost portable tools and support training that enable teacher learning and practice (Amino Labs, 2020).

We report on a framework for a 'value creation' metric for educators to evaluate the success of developing enabling tools for biomaking and related endeavors for learning with K-12 students (Peppers & Rogers, 2006). This framework is derived from anecdotal user experiences and our industry expertise that has observed that identifying key design features—such as platform versatility and learning objective alignment—are quintessential to understanding and achieving user value. This framework emphasizes such education related characteristics as expanded experimentation and learner-centered outcomes (e.g., success in their personal pursuits, independent learning, etc.) as important measures of these features. We share two illustrative case study examples of high school life science teachers who, in their own pursuits, leveraged these key design features which in turn enabled framework outcomes.

We present the case of Jeremy*, a teacher who leveraged the Amino Labs system to complement and extend his pedagogical practices using photo diaries and journaling. We found in our engagement with Jeremy that the Amino Labs system was versatile enough that he could interface it with his existing pedagogical practices (in this case journaling). As a result, learners were able to photo document their progress and creative outcomes. Moreover, Jeremy was able to, in his view, effectively evaluate student learning along their experimental trajectory. We also present the case of Christine*, a teacher who leveraged the Amino Labs system and curriculum-aligned “Zero to Hero Learning Journey” instructional text (Legault and Pahara, 2018) for remote learning situations. We found that learners were enabled in that they could—from a distance—carry out hands-on learning activities and engage in required learning concepts, that would otherwise be restrictive due to issues related to accessibility.

These, and other, collective observations suggest that when designing portable wet lab tools for learning, careful consideration should be made to developing features that make the platform versatile such that they can be readily incorporated into existing pedagogical practice. We also observed that consideration should be placed on designing a tool that not only aligns with important learning priorities (e.g., curriculum benchmarks), but also in a way that enables users to creatively engage across various expertise, and thus broaden access to diverse learners. This finding is significant because it suggests design versatility is an enabling characteristic that allows teachers to leverage tool components to deploy a full synthetic biology-based learning experience (e.g., biomaking) in high school settings. Future work should consider these implications in diverse contexts including countries, grade levels, and age groups.

*pseudonym

Author

• Julie Legault, Amino Labs