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Bioinformatics: The Rutgers Initiative in Teacher Enhancement (BRITE)

Submitted by avershon on Fri, 02/06/2009 - 12:38
Last updated by administrator LRC on Fri, 03/18/2011 - 12:05
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One hundred and fifty five high school teachers, who will offer instruction to 5,500 students in New Jersey, learn how to extract DNA from worm specimens and - once those specimens have been processed by a professional lab - access bioinformatics resources online to analyze the DNA sequences. Students then submit their results to an international database of DNA sequences, thus contributing to the cache of knowledge about genomes. [urban/suburban] 04-22902
Project Information
Cohort: 
2 (2004-2007)
Category: 
Comprehensive
Principal Investigator: 
Andrew (Drew) Vershon
William (Bill) Sofer
Co-Principal Investigator(s): 
Lenore Neigeborn
Sponsor: 
Rutgers University
Primary Focus: 
Bioscience
Organization Location City: 
Piscataway
Organization Location Region/State: 
Middle Atlantic
New Jersey (NJ)
Where project work happens: 
Middle Atlantic
New Jersey (NJ)
Participant type: 
High School Teachers
High School Students
Target Area: 
Suburban
Urban
Award Number: 
0422902
Overview Section

Bioinformatics: the Rutgers Initiative in Teacher Enhancement (BRITE) is an NSF ITEST Comprehensive Project that involves teachers and their students. BRITE invites high school teachers to participate in, and contribute to, a series of scientific "Challenges" posted over the World Wide Web, the answers to which require using the computational tools of molecular biology, structural biology, and bioinformatics. Over the period of the grant, BRITE will work closely with teachers participating in a Local Project and remotely with teachers who participate in a Regional Project. As a result of their involvement, teachers will strengthen their existing curricula with the tools and resources of information technology. Several thousands of high school students will benefit from their teachers' work in the Local and Regional Projects.

Activities Section

Explore ways to effectively integrate bioinformatics and structural biology into existing high school programs so that it becomes a permanent offering of the science curriculum.

Offer a four-week summer Institute and continued academic year follow up activities to enhance the science backgrounds and computing skills of high school biology teachers.

To achieve this, and to model how scientists use information technology (IT) to support their work, BRITE will work with teachers to develop Waksman Challenges. These are problems in molecular biology, bioinformatics and structural biology that teams of high school students pursue using the resources of IT. Challenges will be used for both classroom instruction and evaluation of how comfortable teachers become at integrating IT into their existing science curricula.

Project Links
WGBH Video(s): 
http://itestlrc.edc.org/sites/itestlrc.edc.org/inside_itest/njprofile.html
Other ITEST Project associated with the project: 
HiGene: A Genome Sequencing Project for High Schools