If you are a Bloomington (or a nearby city) resident, you probably have heard about Science Fest. Science Fest is an annual multi-department science outreach event managed by office of science outreach showcasing IU research rolled up as uber fun activities for kids and adults to enjoy.
As a veteran volunteer who has participated in Science Fest for the past 2 years, I was incredibly excited to volunteer for my 3rd year. For my research in Dr. Heather O’Hagan’s lab, I study ovarian cancer stem cells. These types of cancer cells are not visible to naked eye, so we use flow cytometry, a technique used to analyze properties of a cell like their shape, size, etc, to identify a protein that is more prevalent in these cancer stem cells opposed to normal cancer cells.
Imagine my surprise when I talked to Christiane Hassel, manager of Flow cytometry core facility here at IUB, about Science Fest and learned that she will be participating in an exhibit! I signed up to volunteer with her and in this post, I will tell you about my experience with the flow cytometry group’s exhibit.
For Science Fest, Hassel set up 2 main activities. With the help of biology outreach office, she made a skittle color sorter (adapted from How To Mechatronics) to model how a flow cytometer can use color of a ‘cell’ (in this case, color of the skittle) to differentiate it from a population of various different cell types of potentially different colors.
In the other activity, she had an example of one of the most common cell type sorting methods in biology — immune cell sorting. There are various types of immune cells and in research, if one is working with a certain cell type, it is important to have a pure cell population. So, to illustrate this point, we challenged any willing soul coming through the door to a cell sorting game. A participant had to sort 3 different colors of fuzzy pom-poms (our surrogate for 3 types of immune cells). The challengers raced each other to see who could cell sort the fastest. This helped the participants understand the principle of flow cytometry at a basic level. In addition, Hassel had a portable flow cytometer on display and helped answer further questions about the technique.
Credit: Terri Green (Web Support and Communication Services, IUB- Department of Biology)
This year marked the highest number of visitors that biology had, compared to past years. There were at least 40% first time visitors participating in 17 different exhibits led by faculty, staff, research associates, post-doctoral researchers, graduate-, undergraduate-, and high school-students, and community organizations.
My favorite part was teaching kids a little bit about my research and hopefully increasing their understanding about this revolutionary research too. I loved the smiles and encouraging nods of parents when their children were excited to hear about what I had to say or even the wide-eyed look they had when I told them about our skittle color sorter. Science outreach events like these allow us, scientists to break down science of complex techniques into everyday words so that a 4-year old could understand it too! One incredible example was the use of pom-poms sorting game. Pom-poms sorting was interactive and fun, but it also helped explain the science behind sorting. I was happy to help decode science for the participants and hopefully motivate future generations to pursue a career in science!
If you attended Science Fest here at IUB or somewhere else, my question to you is — which exhibit was your favorite? And most importantly — did you have fun?!
This post is a part of Graduate learning outside research series. In future posts, I will focus on the I can Persist (ICP) program and Graduate Women in STEM (GWiSTEM) Teaching fellow initiatives.
Edited by Lana Ruck and Jennifer Sieben
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