In this Adventures in Drug Discovery (ADD) project, the Institute for Future Intelligence (IFI) and the University of Florida (UF) will collaborate with high schools in Florida, Hawaii, Maryland, Ohio, Rhode Island, and South Carolina to develop novel educational technologies and curriculum materials to help teachers and students teach and learn data science as a method for accelerating drug discovery. The key innovation will be Artificial Intelligence for Molecular Science (AIMS, https://intofuture.org/aims.html), an integrated learning platform based on using visual and interactive technologies to open the “opaque box” of the science, data, and computation needed to find or design new drugs. Powered by AIMS, the curriculum materials will provide practical means to integrate data science into chemistry and biology courses. The materials will be aligned with related education standards such as the Next Generation Science Standards. Participating teachers will be supported by ongoing professional development workshops and learning communities. The products of the project will be disseminated through a citizen science program that uses a gamified version of AIMS to engage the general public to explore drug discovery. After the project ends, IFI will maintain the products to ensure that they continue to serve teachers, students, and the public. The scope of this project falls within the mission of NIH’s National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS) related to “incorporating artificial intelligence and machine learning into the drug development process.” The Specific Aims are: 1) To develop the AIMS technologies and materials using a design‐based research framework that involves iterative design cycles informed by student and teacher feedback based on classroom tests; 2) To leverage the complementarity between teaching and inquiry‐based learning to develop content that accommodates the unique interests, values, and funds of knowledge of students; and 3) To create a citizen science program for drug discovery based on gamifying complex computational procedures such as molecular docking and drug screening. To supplement IFI and UF’s expertise, the project will also involve researchers and educators in molecular science, data science, and serious games for citizen science from Harvard Medical School, South Dakota State University, and Northeastern University as consultants.

Increasing participation in the biomedical workforce is essential to meeting the nation’s healthcare needs. The primary objective of the proposed mentored research program is to provide early clinical research experiences and professional development to high school students with the long-term goal of helping meet the growing need in the biomedical workforce. The program will be supported by MUSC’s Youth Collaborative, which is comprised of faculty and trainees focused on adolescent substance use and mental health research, which will provide a rich training ground for real-world research experiences. The proposed program is aligned with NIH’s mission to support educational activities that complement and enhance the training of a workforce to meet the nation’s biomedical, behavioral, and clinical research needs as outlined in PAR-20-153. The specific aims of the Teen Science Ambassador Program are to: provide courses for skills development and hands-on research experiences, as well as mentoring and professional development training to youth interested in STEM careers. This will be accomplished through three focused phases: (1) a 16-week, mentored didactic training on clinical research skills and professional development, including completion of a literature review, oral presentation, and public service announcement; (2) near-peer mentorship training and experience, as well as an internship in an NIH- funded lab focused on adolescent substance use research; and (3) continued networking with peers, faculty, and alumni for long-term career success. Input from community stakeholders and an Advisory Committee will be collected to assess and improve program goals and outcomes, and all program materials will be made publicly available for dissemination and implementation at other institutions. The highly-qualified, multidisciplinary faculty mentorship team, partnerships with community schools and leaders, and rigorous program evaluation from independent evaluators will ensure that the proposed program meets the stated objectives.

The Authentic Literacy and Language (ALL) for Science partnership is developing curriculum materials to engage elementary school students in how scientists communicate, while building students’ science knowledge and skills. Building on a previous project with demonstrated results with students in grades 2-3, ALL for Science is creating four curriculum units for students in grades 4-5 that integrate standards aligned life science topics, with development of students’ science specific disciplinary literacies, numeracy and related health content. Science themes for the units focus on areas of low student performance in life science and reading/writing in Texas. The project will engage a team of teacher leaders, scientists and educators to develop four Texas standards- and NGSS- aligned curriculum units, each designed to provide 3–4 weeks of life science inquiry-based instruction in school or as a blended school and home approach, with aligned reading/English language arts, health and numeracy. The curriculum units and supporting materials will be piloted in local classrooms; field tested through well-matched comparison group studies, with random assignment of groups; and disseminated via the established, high traffic website, BioEd Online (www.bioedonline.org), and through other pathways to reach state and national audiences with high quality, free teaching resources. The project directly will impact approximately 285 teachers and 6,840 students, with availability to teachers of more than 800,000 Texas students and national audiences. We will measure changes in teaching practices and science teaching efficacy beliefs; and will examine growth of students’ content knowledge, science-specific disciplinary literacies and identity formation as members of a science community. This project responds to the SEPA program call for innovative curricula that will prepare students in STEM and enable their teachers to provide instruction using a novel approach.

The University of New Hampshire, in collaboration with faculty participants from the New Hampshire IDeA Network of Biomedical Research Excellence (NH-INBRE), as well as school district and industry partners, propose an NIH Science Education Partnership Award to establish and advance NH CREATES the Future: the NH Collaborative for Regenerative Medicine Education and Training for Engineers and Scientists of the Future (hereafter, NH CREATES). The overall goal of NH CREATES is to establish a robust pipeline extending from middle school to higher education for the burgeoning regenerative medicine and bio fabrication (RM&B) industry in New Hampshire. Aim 1 of NH CREATES will provide formal professional development and training for twelve grades 6-12 teachers per year, in project-based learning implementation through the lens of RM&B and its foundational concepts, (1) organisms for regeneration, (2) cellular and molecular biology, (3) computational methods in biology, and (4) molecular structure and function, as well as responsible conduct of research. Aim 2 provides a set of summer programs for forty youth annually, incorporating project-based learning that is focused on RM&B. This specific platform will also provide a forum where parents, school administrators and industry partners can bring students into a community of near-peer mentors, to establish them on a biotechnology career pathway. Additionally, the project supports teacher development by serving as a learning laboratory educators. Moreover, aim 3 of NH CREATES will establish a NH CREATES Ecosystem, to provide an infrastructure that will build relationships and develop connections between educational institutions within NH INBRE, school teachers and administrators, parents, youth, employers, community resources, and philanthropy. The combination of these stakeholder relationships and their activities establish an innovative ecosystem in New Hampshire that facilitates the entry and retention of students in a biomedical education pipeline spanning middle school to higher education, in order to sustain the workforce to meet NH’s RM&B and biotechnology needs. NH CREATES is a training mechanism to supply the RM&B industry with an education that, in turn, this burgeoning industry can fulfill its potential to cure disease.

In order to increase research skills, preparation and access to authentic research experiences for students in Hawaii and the Pacific, the CIRCLE Program will create partnerships between Hawaii and multiple researchers around the US and possibly the world (although only US partnerships funded through SEPA), to create collaborative research projects that students can perform via distance, with a local mentor and a distance research supervisor/mentor. All students will be given age appropriate general research methodology, ethics and safety training, receive badges for their progress through educational steps, will blog and talk monthly about their progress and research findings, and will compete to win spots to travel to national research conferences. CIRCLE students will be part of a research team of collaborators, often with students from other parts of the country. But most importantly, students will be mentored to create their own research questions as they develop the skills to answer them, thus performing authentic research in high school and will be prepared for and connected with college research programs such as IDeA Networks for Biomedical Research Excellence and Undergraduate Research Opportunities Programs.

Supporting scientific modeling in the high school science classroom 

NeuroLab builds upon the foundation of a prior informal science education (ISE) project funded through the National Institutes of Health Science Education Partnership Award (SEPA) program. This five-year effort engaged high school students in immersive residential research experiences that bridged developmental neuroscience and comparative functional genomics, and connected them to resources developed by the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. Through their participation in these authentic ISE experiences, students explored the most updated models of nervous system hardwiring and helped identify new molecular genetic tools to visualize neurons as this dynamic process unfolds during embryonic development.

To expand project impacts, our focus has shifted to the high school science classroom and developing a pathway for teachers to pursue a new vision of science teaching and learning articulated in the National Research Council’s Framework for K-12 Science Education and the Next Generation Science Standards.  NeuroLab is a multi-lesson, storyline-based instructional unit that links student questions about a rare and unusual movement disorder (the anchoring phenomenon) to interconnected science concepts, ideas, and data that span various life science disciplines.  In partnership with high school science teachers, our scientists developed resources and strategies to help students build – in stepwise fashion – an explanatory model of the movement disorder as they pursue their questions in a collaborative classroom learning environment.  To develop their models, students explore converging lines of behavioral, electrophysiological, neuroanatomical, molecular genetic, cellular, developmental, and neuroimaging data obtained from studies of human subjects and model organisms over the last several decades.  The discoveries made by students through the analysis and interpretation of authentic data – which includes big data presented in authoritative databases used by biomedical scientists and physicians – are gradually assimilated into working models that form a major focus of classroom discourse.  These models undergo periodic revision and gradually increase in complexity and explanatory power as students navigate through the NeuroLab sense-making trajectory.

The Communicating Data project engages secondary school teachers and students from both rural and urban areas in Maine and New Hampshire as citizen scientists in collecting both private and public drinking water samples for heavy metal analysis and communicating their findings with a goal of improving public health in their communities.

This new project will build on our current SEPA project which has a focus on arsenic in private well water in rural communities. Based on what we are learning in our first project, that nearly all communities have a mix of some public water systems as well as private wells, we will provide a more comprehensive experience for students by having them collect home drinking water samples for analysis, no matter what the source. We will provide curriculum on drinking water systems so that students can identify their source of drinking water.

While our first project focused on arsenic in wells, many schools found that uranium and lead and other contaminants were also issues that need attention. So, we will develop curriculum that addresses multiple drinking water contaminants and provide training for teachers in these areas. We have already developed data literacy tools and curriculum that will serve teachers and students in this new project.

With these supports in place, our new SEPA project will focus on helping students create data visualizations so that they can more effectively communicate their findings to various audiences. We know from surveys of homeowners who contributed well water samples in the first years of our current project, that the likelihood of mitigating arsenic in drinking water was related to the extent of parent-child interactions in the home. To further support these interactions, we will also focus on intergenerational learning. In guided focus sessions with parents, we will get their input on developing appropriate at-home conversation prompts and sink-side activities to engage families more actively in understanding the importance of healthy drinking water. We anticipate that this approach, combined with our expanded focus on multiple contaminants in drinking water from homes dependent on either private or public drinking water sources in either urban or rural environments will enable us to more broadly disseminate our project and facilitate its replicability in other geographic areas.