BioBuilder brings Posit tools to high school bioengineers

The COVID-induced changes in education led BioBuilder to reimagine its curriculum. We wanted our online programming to stay true to the core of what BioBuilder teaches, namely:

• A team-based approach to creative problem solving
• Legitimate biotechnology skill building
• Meaningful data analysis
• Professional quality communication

Our new programs have sustained and expanded our goal of providing life-changing science education for all. One silver lining from the upending of everyone’s school plan has been the positive impact we make with BioBuilder’s online content which includes the integration of Posit into our programs.

We saw that there was a great need for teachers and students to connect to one another and not feel so isolated in these efforts. So the online collaborative platform that Posit Cloud provided was a tremendous asset. In our opinion, providing access to a real-world tool like Posit allowed our students to develop and transfer their analytic skills to other courses, carrying them forward into college and their careers.

Posit Cloud was leveraged to share data, perform analysis and provide visualization scripts. R Markdown files were created to integrate R code and instructional text. These files were then rendered as HTML files for display on the web. Students created personal Posit Cloud accounts, and were then granted access to instructor-developed coding resources that they could edit and learn with their copy of the code with no danger of overwriting the source material. Students applied the instructor’s materials to their research projects then created original analyses and visualizations in the context of their unique synthetic biology context. This gave students the ability to integrate and display instructional text, related R code, and the output of the code such as plots and results of statistical analyses.

BioBuilder brings tomorrow’s science to today’s classrooms. By turning cutting-edge science and engineering into teachable modules, we open minds and doors into the world of STEM education for students and educators alike. Our curriculum is based on the undergraduate curriculum in synthetic biology that is taught at MIT.

In 2007 with NSF support and the partnership of award-winning high school teachers, BioBuilder began converting modern research questions into hands-on laboratory content and problem-based learning modules that align with national science standards. Established as an independent 501c3 in 2011, BioBuilder supports teachers and students in nearly every US state and more than 30 countries around the world.

To complement our flagship classroom curriculum, textbook and lab kits, BioBuilder has traditionally offered three out-of-school-time programs: the BioBuilderClub, the High School Apprenticeship Challenge, and our Summer Professional Development for teachers.

BioBuilder also runs a Learning Lab inside the entrepreneurial community of LabCentral in Cambridge, MA, bringing science education into a place where science is happening and enabling us to expand our year-round programming.