With the help of a $50,000 grant awarded to Wake Forest University, seniors at Atkins High School will be busy working to produce animated educational videos about biotechnology this fall, university officials said this week.
The Education Enhancement grant from the N.C. Biotechnology Center will pay for the project, which is called "Visualizing Biotechnology in Four Dimensions: Hands-on Learning in High School."
The project is part a local collaborative effort to help high-school students across the state understand how cellular structures work by using animated characters.
Jed Macosko, the project director and assistant professor of physics at Wake Forest, developed the project idea after advising a group of the university's student entrepreneurs who formed a company called BioBotz.
"The grant is a first step toward getting students and children interested in biotechnology and life inside of a cell," Macosko said.
"Through the magic of computer animation, the observer will fly from the outside of a body into an organ, down into a cell, and land at the location where each student's chosen molecular machine performs its function," he said.
Macosko said he hopes that the three-minute animations that students produce will be sent to biology teachers in the state for free.
The work at Atkins is one element of what BioBotz hopes to do to draw interest in biotechnology.
Officials said that Atkins was the ideal school partner because it offers programs in both computer visualization and biotechnology.
"We want to have their input to create something that interests their age group," said Terry Howerton, a biotechnology teacher at the school.
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