Thank you for the thoughtful comment and questions Jay! 

We do see that using real biological materials increases curiosity about underlying scientific concepts and processes. Most frequently this emerges as questions to the facilitator asking for more details or information about how the biology behind the activity works and why. We notice that letting young people actually touch, feel, and even smell the squishy nature of biology creates a visceral personal connection to the systems and motivates deeper curiosity about what they are experiencing first hand. Given our operational constraints (drop in science center floor programming), we only have about 20-25 minutes max for each session, but facilitators have training in the content connections to be able to support real-time information delivery in a customized manner for the visitors in a given session. For the genetics activities, the facilitators are volunteer graduate students from Stanford University, meaning that they have very deep content knowledge which they can share in their conversations. 

Additionally, since activity duration and facilitator bandwidth are limited by our context, we design our activities to include a content layer in the physical Biotinkering Lab space that visitors can choose to engage with on their own for deeper knowledge. This has included things like information on wall panels, vitrine displays, laminated table top information sheets designed to support specific stations, as well as video and wall projector content. Using these activity and space design strategies, we have been able to layer in opt-in content such as info about the organisms being used (ie. yeast, bacteria), how the process is relevant in the real world (ie. kombucha biomaterial products, algae inks), insights on how living things grow and change (ie. timelapse of streptomyces on petri dishes), details about the genetics involved in different traits (ie. hair/coat color, lactose intolerance, sex) or animations showing the details of a chemical reaction (algae string cross-linking). Facilitators direct curious visitors to these in-space content resources as needed. And finally, some (but not all) of our biotinkering activities have been adapted into at-home or classroom experiences, which include various supplemental PDF and video resources highlighting different parts of the activity process, underlying science, and more. You can find links to those resources on our Biotinkering Lab homepage (here)! The Ask A Geneticist website is a separate program specifically focused on genetics content that is done in partnership with Stanford University. Although, long term we do think it could be interesting to have a similar resource for all our biotinkering activities.

As far as age ranges and how that impacts curiosity, we design our activities imagining a target audience of 10-12 year olds, but since we are a family science center, we make sure to include ways for the experience be adapted down to ages as young as 6 and and also integrate elements meant to appeal to older children, caregivers, and adults. Interestingly, we definitely notice that biotinkering as an approach is really great at leveraging the innate curiosity in children - they usually are excited to jump right in and try things out. On the other hand, adults are more hesitant and seem to feel a need to try to figure out what the “correct way” for them to engage is, even though there really isn’t one!

The preliminary data that we have from formative evaluations and a few initial summatives (post-visit surveys of 9-13 year olds) point to some really interesting overall trends, which we briefly mentioned in the video:

• Engagement: Greater than 60% of respondents rate their biotinkering experience as extremely fun and interesting (equal across genders).
• STEM Identity: There is a strong and consistent self-reported increase in interest in science across all activities (largest increase for girls).
• Perceptions of Science: The top two descriptors most-associated with Biotinkering Lab activities are “creative thinking” and “doing real science.”
• Agency: The explicit invitation to make personally motivated choices in a lab and do experiments without being told exactly what to do excites young people.

I hope I answered all your questions!

You did! Thank you!

Thank you for the kind comment! As far as what we would do differently, that is an interesting question. Each time we have developed and launched a new biotinkering activity over the last few years, we have taken into account learnings from our past experiences, so we have been lucky to be able to do a lot of iterative evolution of our approach along the way. One thing that comes to mind, however, that we have not been able to explore in our space is how the experiences change if we have two facilitators at a time. Based on how I have seen other museum workshops and makerspaces operate that have this staffing model, I believe it could allow us to get more creative with the complexity of the experience flow as well as support our ability to let in/out visitors on a rolling basis. Both of these things have interesting potential implications for allowing the length of the experience to be more customizable for different visitor groups and individuals, but are not feasible with only a single facilitator. Sometimes we have visitors that are done early but also frequently have ones that want more time or express a desire to be able to do certain steps more than once and linger in the space, so being able to offer that and tailor the depth of the experience on a more individual level would be really interesting to explore.

Thank you Justice! Hearing your thoughts on this subject is always inspiring, I appreciate the discussion! And yes, not surprisingly, we agree that, while rote memorization has its place and value, it is definitely not the only (or often most important) outcome for science learning experiences. I would say that doing good science usually hinges more on asking good questions and figuring out how to explore them to actually generate new knowledge. Along those lines, a focus on the process of science as opposed to the acquisition of static knowledge is central to our work. This is one of the ways our approach aligns very closely with making and tinkering pedagogies. As you mention, being able to think creatively and innovatively about practicing and using science is critical for driving real-world discovery and advancement, so giving young people early insight and exposure to those elements is important for nurturing a truly authentic understanding of and engagement with science. This is why we think about designing biotinkering experiences that invite participants to imagine, design and shape the process of discovery for themselves.

I’d also argue that the above is especially true in our particular type of informal learning context, which, as you point out, by necessity involves more transient interactions with students. In a broader educational ecosystem, one-off 20 minute experiences will never be the ideal location for acquisition of deep knowledge. Different learning formats, structures, and venues all have different strengths and weaknesses. One of our unique strengths as a drop-in exhibit in a science center is the opportunity for our activities to be a relatively barrier-free gateway experience for a very large number of people. We serve over 35,000 visitors a year in the Biotinkering Lab! Our goal with each of these interactions is to authentically engage young people with science as a personally relevant and creative process by supporting agency and choice. This means that the outcomes which most motivate us are things like building learner confidence, creative capacity, problems-solving skills, persistence, and STEM identity. And, our observations and early data suggest that biotinkering activities can do this! Having a learner understand all of the scientific details is not a necessary precursor to achieving this type of impact.

As you mention, the landscape of modern biotechnology is advancing more rapidly than textbooks and has begun to dramatically blur the lines between traditional disciplines. Young people need to shift their core understanding of biology to be ready to engage in a future where biology can be a technology, an engineering system, a manufacturing platform, a creative medium, or even a design space. Experiences at the elementary and middle school level shape career path decisions, so what seeds do we need to plant with kids to nurture their interest, confidence, and participation in these emerging fields? Not surprisingly, I’d say things like creativity, innovation, and problem solving skills are at the center of that list over facts. 

And just to share one little story from our work about how relatively short experiences CAN be very powerful. A 10-year-old boy was so intrigued by what he learned making Mushroom Bricks at The Tech that the following year he convinced his First Lego League robotics team to pursue a mycelium-based solution to a challenge about space travel to Mars. Their team contacted our staff for additional research (and to share their adorable presentation with us) and their project advanced all the way to national competition. This kid's 20 minute experience in the Biotinkeing Lab shaped how he approached a future challenge encountered in the context of a different discipline! Biology is now a tool in his general problem-solving kit, which is exactly what I would love to see more of.

Oops! Nearly forgot to answer the favorite biomaterial question :) That is definitely a hard one, because they are all so fun! But I’d probably have to say mycelium materials because of the ability to grow 3D solid objects. The ability to grow useful products at scale is so very satisfying and inspiring. I think it is the biomaterial that I have personally played around with the most on my own time - both to create things for myself and with amazing community collaborators! What about you?

I love mycelium because they are so flexible!  As you know, Corinne Takara is doing some incredible things with bioplastics and all sorts of other materials. 

Hi Julia. I’ll start with the bio-inspired design question, which I love. Thanks for starting the discussion! I think that there are a great many ways that biotinkering and bio-inspired design could connect and synergize. I usually think of biotinkering as using a biological system itself as the creative and problem solving medium, but there is definitely space for imagining how this approach could be applied to the ideas of mimicry or even speculative design. And there are actually some interesting potential benefits from an accessibility standpoint, given that bio-inspired design systems and/or concepts might often not require the sometimes cost- or experience-limiting microbiology equipment and techniques. Amazing programs like the Biodesign Challenge have started to engage students more with these concepts at the high school and college levels, but I think it could also be a great entry point for engaging for younger audiences as well. This topic would be super interesting to pursue more in future work, as both areas are rich with possibilities for inspiration, engagement, and learning! Do you work with bio-inspired design in your programs?

For the gender question, the post-visit evaluation data that we have been collecting so far does include gender information, so we can analyze responses with that breakdown. So far, we have seen that the appeal of and engagement with these types of experiences is not significantly different between genders, although we have yet to collect our final data sets. The one place where we have noticed a trend that is different between genders is that when asked if the experience increased their interest in science, answers from girls on average are slightly higher (larger expressed increase in interest) than from boys. We are excited, however, to look at this question more in depth as we get our final data, so hopefully I will have more info to share on this question in the future. 

I find it very interesting that this stood out to you! These are definitely multi-disciplinary activities in many ways. In particular, on the STEM side, we do lean on overlap of biology with chemistry a lot for our Biotinkering Lab programs, as the time constraints of a science center setting (visitors are only there for up to 30 minutes) really limits the amount of real-time organismal biology that can happen. When working with living systems in this setting, we have strategies for designing experiences that use cooking-show style strategies to have visorts collaborate with each other across time, but often, the fastest part of biology that we have access to for tinkering is in fact chemistry. And, to your point about if a better title might be just bio+tinkering, I would agree! And in fact, that is actually what we call our programs and activities at The Tech (BioTinkering). The title of this video was trying to situate our work in a more formalized/familiar field for this showcase, and the core subject area that we approach our system selection and activity design/framing from is biology. But, as you point out, we integrate ideas, approaches, and content from other STEM and also art, design, and architecture. I’d agree that being truly single-discipline these days is not only challenging, it's potentially very limiting. Thanks for sharing your thoughts on this, Anne.