DUBOIS – DuBois Area High School students from Kyle Gordon’s gifted program and Rob Keith’s biochemistry and chemistry II classes recently attended several bioengineering workshops at the Carnegie Science Center in Pittsburgh.
Among the workshops, students were able to participate in many hands-on learning experiences, utilizing several tools and practices associated with the bioengineering and medical fields.
In the “Today’s Medical Technologies” workshop, students learned about the latest technologies in diagnosis. Not only did they see some of the scopes and scanners in action, but they got to use some of the equipment in their own scenario-based challenges.
The other workshop that students participated in was “The Brave New World: Decisions at the Nanoscale.” In this session, students got a crash course in nanotechnology and were challenged with decision making on where and how this technology should be applied. They even got to use nanotech to create their own bookmarks.
“The Nanotechnology session really put things into scale for me,” commented junior Noah Orner.
“I liked the trip because it gave lots of hands-on activities and I learned a lot about this growing field,” said freshman Mackenzie Obenreder.
The day concluded with a discussion over lunch with a couple of leading researchers in nanotechnology from the University of Pittsburgh. Here, students had the opportunity to hear about the life and academic journey of a bioengineer and learn about different perspectives of study within the field. They also got an exclusive look at some recent breakthroughs in prosthetics.
“I liked the Pitt students’ presentation because I learned a lot about what they do at Pitt in regards to bioengineering research and development,” said senior Jamie Houston.