The CHESS Lending Library is a scientific equipment loan program hosted by the Cornell High Energy Synchrotron Source that provides free hands-on experiment kits for empowering teachers and engaging students in high quality labs. Kits are designed for specific scientific fields such as biology, chemistry, and physics as well as different age groups including elementary, middle, and high school grade levels. Learn more by downloading our 2023 brochure!
Understanding the significance of proper training, we provide in-person workshops in Ithaca year-round to supply teachers with the necessary knowledge and pedagogical techniques to run complex experiments. We also provide virtual training for new teachers and to our long-time users to enable them to introduce their colleagues to our program, amplifying the impact of our resources. This has allowed us to welcome new teachers from diverse locations, and expand our outreach to Maryland, Long Island, Massachusetts, and other locations across the US to which we ship experimental kits free of charge. Florianna Blanton is the Lending Library Director who taught and coordinated this workshop, bringing decades of educational expertise directly to attendees who will use the Library experiment kits.
The CHESS Lending Library recently hosted an in-person teacher workshop to train educators in the use of its DNA electrophoresis kits.
16 teachers registered to attend the all-day training on August 8th, hosted in the investigative biology labs of Comstock Hall at Cornell University. CHESS provided all scientific equipment and consumables for a paternity test lab using the DNA electrophoresis technique; this equipment included: micropipettes, centrifuges, dry block incubators, transilluminators, DNA plasmids, restriction enzymes, agarose gels, GelStar fluorescent Stain, loading dye, electrophoresis boxes and power supplies. The teachers learned the proper and safe use of all the equipment, essential for them to go on to train their students in the proper use of this highly sophisticated and expensive equipment (~$7,000 in two boxes). The teachers learned to prepare the gel blocks so that the plasmid DNA can be properly digested by the enzyme, including pipetting the biological solution into the microfuge tubes to be put into an incubator and centrifuge. After the enzyme has done its job, a high contrast dye is added to help identify DNA location within the gel. The teachers then learn to use the highly sophisticated micropipettes to inject/load the biological samples into a matrix array of wells made of highly expensive consumables. Then the electrophoresis box is connected to a power supply where the negatively charged DNA moves towards the positively charged electrode. After 90 minutes, the gels are transferred to the transilluminators where the fluorescent stain has attached to the DNA strands and reveals a banding pattern which is unique to every person and through which you can determine a relationship between the individuals whose DNA are being tested. Then a final analysis is done about whether a person of interest could be the biological father of the child based on the patterns revealed of the DNA bands.
DNA electrophoresis is part of science class standards across the state, teachers do a paper lab demonstration with their students that illustrates the technique, but that of course doesn’t convey how great the lab is. To implement the actual lab, specific equipment is needed along with expensive biologicals that are very hard to get, especially for low-funded public teachers. So, to have access to the equipment, the CHESS Lending Library requires teachers to attend training on how to use the equipment safely. The pedagogy is nailed down for the lab in order to make a very long and arduous lab straightforward to implement. Within the first few hours of advertising the workshop, there were 11 teachers who signed up on a summer holiday weekend. The fact that this workshop is free of charge, and that CHESS offers all of the equipment and expendables free of charge, is very exciting to them. It is thrilling for teachers to be able to expose their students to a lab that students would only be able to have exposure to in certain fields in college.
These workshops are incredibly popular also because schools aren’t able to spend money on experiments that will only be used a few times a year. Teachers comment on how much students excel in areas of the Regents exams that overlap with the contents of the labs; they also comment on how the students come alive when engaging with the hands-on elements of these labs. Many teachers even call the local press in their smaller towns to feature in local news, using high end lab equipment used in scientific and forensics labs all over the world. Teachers comment that students see them decades later with vivid memories of engaging with the labs from this lending library program. We expect reservations to start coming in for DNA electrophoresis kit in January, as it is a more advanced lab that requires some background training before teachers request it.
This teacher workshop empowers educators to see that they can not only instruct students, but also engage with other teachers to show them how to use kits and how to reserve experiments for use in their classrooms. This workshop serves as an example of how educators can teach other educators, as often the teachers who attend these workshops volunteer to present at future workshops and larger organized events after seeing the impact firsthand, becoming comfortable with the equipment and lab experiments.
Our program is very different from other programs because we don’t want to just see them once, we want them to come back for many years to come for kit reservations and future workshops. The CHESS Lending Library strives for an ongoing relationship with educators because the better our relationships and networking, the better our experiments and resources are used, leading to greater educational impact for students across our country. Some of these workshop attendees also become lecturers for the virtual workshops hosted by the Lending Library throughout the year. These workshops also provide a uniquely free opportunity to fulfill in-service credit hours for the State of New York as part of their professional development. Engaging with Cornell university is also a prestigious opportunity to bolster the credentials and integrity of teachers’ academic portfolio.
