Our educational mission is to support a new field of engineering, based on building cells and building with cells. To do this we need to create awareness, in academia and in the public, of the possibility of engineering cells.  Additionally, this endeavor will need a new generation of engineers comfortable with using the cell as an engineering medium.

We believe that cellular engineering provides a way to inject concepts of engineering into traditional biological curricula at all levels, including K-12. A major component of our educational plan has been to develop high school curricula based on an analogy of cells as robots.  We have developed a two to three week hands-on workshop for high school science teachers and their students, who attend the course as co-learners, using LEGO mindstorms robots as a platform to solve problems faced by living cells. This course introduces the idea of an engineering design-build-test cycle while simultaneously teaching attendees how to program robots to accomplish complex tasks. In parallel, attendees perform simple experiments to explore cellular behavior, investigating phenomena such as phototaxis in volvox (or photophobia in euglena), chemotaxis in Physarum, and self-assembly in hydra. Framing these phenomena explorations through a robotics analogy clarifies unseen internal biological processes and easily extends the labs into hands-on engineering projects through robotics modeling.

Over five summers, the Cellular Construction workshop has engaged 97 students and 35 teachers from eight different school districts in the San Francisco Bay Area. Notably, the majority of teachers who have participated have brought experiences from the workshop to their classrooms. Many of these teachers integrated design challenges that required programming and robotics to model cellular behavior into their curricula. See here for more details on the program.

The 2024 Cellular Construction Workshop will be held in-person in June at the UCSF campus.

All high school lesson materials can be found in our lesson portal: here