J. Craig Venter Institute’s DiscoverGenomics! Mobile Lab Visits JPDS-NC

Last Thursday, the sixth grade class participated in a hands-on learning experience when the J. Craig Venter Institute’s DiscoverGenomics! Mobile Laboratory came to JPDS-NC. The sixth grade class boarded the fifty foot long bus and, using copper binding, phenol, spectrophotometers and micropipettes, investigated how much protein is in different protein drinks.

The DiscoverGenomics! Mobile Lab will return three more times this year. The next experiments will relate to Genetics. Students will have access to state of the art lab equipment, such as gel electrophoresis, and will conduct experiments designed to help them think about how scientists use their observations and investigations to learn.   

One of the goals for the Science program at JPDS-NC is to have activities that are “minds-on”, as well as hands-on. The Mobile Lab allows our sixth graders to design their own investigations. Students prepare their experiments and are taught how to control variables and measure with precision, what to measure and how to represent data in graph form. This opportunity is in conjunction with the Scientific Method unit now being taught.

This summer, our JPDS-NC science specialist, Elana Cohen, spent a week at the DiscoverGenomics! training at the J. Craig Venter Institute in Rockville, MD where she was educated on the latest in Genomics research and trained on the best ways to integrate the labs offered on the Mobile Laboratory into the science curriculum.