(510c) Biomaterials Design Projects and Hands-On Activities for High School Students

High school students are not often exposed to the field of biomaterials. We have developed and implemented several interactive biomaterials activities for high school students. The activities performed at two events (Vanderbilt Summer Academy and Biomaterials Day) will be described during this presentation. 11^th and 12^th grade students at the Vanderbilt Summer Academy completed a biomaterials design project requiring them to create polyurethane scaffolds that could be used to deliver a drug and provide mechanical support for a given tissue. Students participated in hands-on activities that involved making polyurethane scaffolds, measuring release kinetics and determining release mechanism of dye from various scaffolds, and performing tensile tests to create stress-strain curves and determine mechanical properties of the scaffolds. Students worked on the design project for a total of ~20 h over the course of three days. High school students attending Biomaterials Day participated in a networking lunch, poster session, and hands-on activities. The activities lasted half an hour each and included extracting your own DNA, measuring the strength and Young's modulus of biomaterial scaffolds, and making your own lab-on-a-chip.