The inaugural CSIE|UM Symposium was held on Friday, June 19, 2015. This event, as are the rest of our activities, was designed, organized, and carried out by the CSIE|UM organizing committee.
The theme for the day revolved around the challenges for teaching undergraduate laboratory courses.
Participants socialized over breakfast food during the registration period. We welcomed a total of 87 participants, including 27 colleagues who came to Ann Arbor from Eastern Michigan University, Oakland University, Kettering University, Michigan State University, Hope College, Marygrove College, and Sienna Heights University.
Panel on Laboratory Challenges
The first session was a panel discussion featuring representative from four of the active laboratory development projects going on in general chemistry (Jordan Boothe), organic chemistry (Rachel Merzel and Ginger Shultz), and analytical laboratories (Sudarat Lee) in the department, plus our plenary speaker, Prof. Beth Taylor, from MIT sharing her experiences in reforming biochemistry laboratories.
Panel (Video) Part 1
Panel (Video) Part 2
Opening panel on laboratory challenge (l-to-r: J Boothe, G Shultz, B Taylor, R Merzel, S Lee)
Questions for our panelists included:
* Brief Introductions – Who are you, where are you from, and what got you interested in Chemistry?
* Innovative Labs – What have you done and why did you do it?
* What was your process for reforming your lab?
* What was the biggest challenge that you ran into during the process?
Questions from the Attendees
+ What was your motivation for change? Was there some dissatisfaction in the “old way” that inspired you?
+ How have assessments changed to meet the new laboratory requirements?
+ In creating laboratory experiences where students can fail, and that is a part of the process, how does this impact how they are graded?
+ The instructors (graduate students) for these labs may come from a variety of backgrounds. How can you prepare a biochemistry graduate student to lead a reformed organic lab?
During the last 30 minutes, all of the participants were charged with a discussion question, and broke into small groups. The question: if you had just a 2- to 3-hour session to introduce laboratory science to a group of pre-matriculation students during a summer program, what would you do? Discussions ranged in topics and implementations, where a common theme was the difficulty in exploring chemistry without knowing much chemistry. This led to the idea of using this time to craft an experience focused on scientific practices such as analyzing data, making claims, and drawing conclusions. With a multidisciplinary audience, this provided an opportunity for a broader discussion within the groups on what core scientific practices are and how they can be experienced in such a short session.
Poster Session & Lunch
Starting at noon, a group of 17 posters, including those from some of our off-campus guests, were displayed in the lower Atrium. Conversations over the catered lunch from Qdoba were plentiful and animated.
The list of poster can be found in the Symposium Program
Lunchtime poster session in the lower Atrium.
Laboratory Workshops
In the next session, four interactive workshops featured activities drawn from some active projects in the department.
Jordan Boothe (Wolfe lab) and Phil McClory (Hakansson Lab) led a hands-on laboratory session on the synthesis of Titanium and Zirconium Oxide nanoparticles designed for implementation in General Chemistry laboratory.
Professor Anne McNeil and her team (Michele Nelson, Matt Beyersdorf, Meg Breen, Rachel Merzel, Sameer Phadke, Danielle Zurcher and Nagash Clarke) got feedback on their plan to introduce group meeting style discussions in Organic I laboratory.
Kevin Ileka (Hakansson Lab), Sudarat Lee (Maldonado Lab), and Daniel Steyer (Kennedy Lab) held a hands-on session that introduced an undergraduate microfluidics experiment, where students use agar and everyday items to model microfluidic channels and learn basics of fluid dynamics. Participants were able to perform all aspects of the experiment: chip fabrication, chip characterization, and on-chip detection of iron (III) salicylate complex.
Dr. Ginger Shultz held a workshop aimed at exploring instructional strategies used to support students in developing self-directed learning skills and problem-solving skills during problem-based experiments in Organic II laboratory..
Plenary Presentation
Dr. Elizabeth Vogel Taylor (MIT) gave our plenary presentation to close the day’s activities. Working as a part of the Howard Hughes Professorship program, she and her colleagues have integrated cutting edge applications of modern biochemical research into the undergraduate laboratory program. These efforts have also benefitted greatly from the dense cluster of biotech and pharma within walking distance of the MIT campus.
A link to the laboratory work can be found here.
http://drennan.mit.edu/education/education-interests/biochemistry-lab/
A publication about this work:
Taylor, EV, Fortune JA, Drennan, CL (2010) A Research-Inspired Laboratory Sequence Investigating Acquired Drug Resistance. Biochemistry and Molecular Biology Education, 38(4), 247-252.
In addition to some of the evaluation work involving the laboratory program, Dr. Taylor also presented work on a set of videos used in the General Chemistry courses to spark interest in basic science research at MIT, and to connect fundamental classroom topics to the advanced ones.