Like many educators, Crystal McDowell describes incorporating MiniOne Technology into her class as a game-changer. After receiving multiple grants, she has been able to equip her lab as a biotechnology lab! Her goal is to integrate biotechnology into all of her courses as a viable means of promoting STEM education with her students. She often explains to them that understanding of biology and other sciences spark the ideas for engineering innovations. For example, knowing the structure of DNA, understanding principles of electricity, and other chemistry and physics concepts helped to develop the lab technique we know as gel electrophoresis!
So, what is Crystal’s latest project? She has designed an after-school program that incorporates excerpts from resources freely available from the CDC Science Ambassador program as well as the AP With We Service program. Every lesson, as the students learn about public health, they embark on a different hands-on MiniOne lab investigation to provide real-world experiences about a number of public health topics.
Click here for an 8-9 week syllabus incorporating MiniOne investigations to a public health program!
Following the 8-9 week program, students work with community partners to develop a plan for service projects related to public health, implement their projects, and share about their impact at a celebration at the end of the year. They will document their experiences and artifacts in a digital portfolio that are part of their service learning project.
Crystal’s ultimate goal is to offer a public health course with the AP with WE Service program embedded within for students concurrently enrolled in AP Biology and the public health course.
This model could help you start your own public health course or to integrate public health into your current courses!
Ideas for Artifacts for Student Service Projects:
- Students work in teams to research various public health issues or conditions and create a digital exhibit that could be publicly viewed worldwide for a global service project centered around public health awareness.
- Locally, students could create an actual exhibit that could be on display at a community center or rotate through schools or other public areas for a public health awareness campaign.
- Students can learn to effectively advocate to communicate and share their projects and what they have learned to local, state and federal legislators through writing letters/emails and making phone calls to their representatives and other public officials.
- Students could create programs for middle and elementary school students and present those programs to educate students about a particular public health issue.
- Students could volunteer at community events raising funds for public health issues or help to organize those events.
- Students could collect items to provide care packages for patients.
- Students can create digital or print artifacts for public awareness campaigns for education on public health topics (i.e., brochures, infographics, posters, websites, etc.)
- Students could partner with a research institution and actually use databases to perform research on a specific topic and present their findings about the impacts of public health and connections to communities.
Want to know more about integrating hands-on MiniLabs into your public health course? Browse our labs or contact us today!
