FAU Lab School Program wins the GoTeach! Education Foundation STEM Innovation Award!
Monday, Sep 18, 2023
The Education Foundation of Palm Beach County’s GoTeach! Classroom Grants encourage educators to create innovative and exciting educational opportunities for their students. GoTeach! Classroom Grants focus on these priority areas: Literacy, Career Education, Financial Literacy and STEM. Dr. Jennifer Krill of FAU High School- Jupiter Campus in Partnership with Max Planck Academy won the $5,000 GoTeach! STEM Innovation Award at the high school level. Her proposal for the FAUHS Experiential Research Program aims to develop classroom-based STEM research experiences for high school students.
The FAUHS Experiential Research Program will provide students with hands-on opportunities to conduct STEM research and master cutting-edge scientific and technical skills in a classroom setting, going through the process of scientific research under the supervision of a teacher over the course of a semester. Students learn relevant content knowledge, experimental protocols, data collection and analysis, ethical use of model organisms in scientific research, and scientific communication skills, with iterative feedback for student improvement in the first half of the course. Students then apply their knowledge and skills, under the mentorship of a researcher, to develop their own unique question, design an experiment, collect and analyze data to determine if their hypothesis is supported by evidence. Student independent projects culminate in an oral poster presentation and a manuscript in the format of a scientific journal article. The money awarded will go to funding course-based research experiences in Neurophysiology, Drosophila Genes and Behavior, and Imaging and Fluorescence courses in the spring!