This past fall,
Boyer-Andersen capitalized on the success of the at-home kits by leading
their roll-out across the microbiology courses of faculty members
Carlton Cooper and Ramona Neunabel. “Our focus all along has been to
provide students with some real life, hands-on experiences,” said
Boyer-Andersen. “Science is a hands-on endeavor, and given we were
constrained by the pandemic, we were trying to look at ways that we
could provide those hands-on experiences for students while they were
safely in their home.”
Ultimately, department lab staff and
faculty connected with enrolled students to coordinate safe delivery of
each lab kit while the departments connected with each course funded the
necessary postage. Microbiology students each received a science kit
with some lab necessities before the semester began. The packages
contained condiment cups and lids, microfuge tubes, sterile pipettes and
a non-sterile pipette. As some substitutions had to be made for
students learning from home, the package also included auger powder,
beef cubes and a pair bamboo appetizer skewers.
“Students
generally use sterile loops in the lab, but we ended up opting for
appetizer skewers,” said Boyer-Andersen. “Then they would wrap the
biodegradable loops in foil and boil them as a sterilization procedure
so that we could use them to explore the aseptic technique from their
own kitchen.
Like his classmates, Hunsinger was charged with crafting
his own Winogradsky column, a miniature enclosed ecosystem designed to
create bacteria not able to be grown under normal laboratory conditions.
He added pond mud to a clear soda bottle to enrich the microbial
communities of the sediment, mixed in an egg when he got home to allow
for the creation of a sulfide gradient and the finishing touch — a
carbon source of newspaper clippings — would eventually produce an
oxygen gradient. With a little sun, Hunsinger soon had a bottle full of
colorful layers of bacterial communities.
“The department has done
an excellent job converting the laboratory aspect of the class into an
at-home format,” said Hunsinger, who — like his classmates — used the
auger powder, a food-grade substitute for gelatin, to create homemade
media, while the beef cubes served as a way to incorporate a yeast
extract into his column.
The lessons learned through the semester
are valuable ones for both faculty and students, but at the end of the
day Boyer-Andersen says students responded positively to taking a
hands-on approach to science.
“These days — with a little
creativity — the sky is the limit when it comes to the experimentation
and research you can do from home,” added Hlousek-Radojcic. “After all,
this is science the way people have done it for hundreds of years — long
before we ended up in these fancy labs with all of this equipment.”
