Developing physical confidence in a lab environment is important to student learning in a lab class. Tactile-based learning skills and spatial awareness of equipment help to ensure students are able to use equipment properly, rather than simply relying on textbook knowledge. The COVID19 pandemic has highlighted the lack of viable existing solutions to serve this need as it has accelerated the trend towards online and hyflex spaces of learning. However, we soon realized that there is a growing need to address the inequities and inadequacies of educational resources in the US and around the world. Many state of the art applications require expensive setups like a VR headset, and the traditional video and text based solutions leave students with a poor learning experience.

Over the course of the last two years, we have developed prototype lab modules that are currently available in beta for iPad, iPhone, Andriod phones, and tablet devices. This ensures that our solution is accessible to different students and communities. It also addresses the inequities of educational resources in the US and around the world by putting lab experiments within the reach of students anywhere.

Our cross-disciplinary and cross-divisional team with expertise in arts and sciences, engineering, medicine, and public health consists of primarily undergraduate students and faculty mentors, who are able to directly empathise with the need for better online lab science education material.

During year one, we have been able to focus on building an MVP prototype with a basic micropipetting lab module. Since then we have scaled to 5 lab modules in year two, and have been working with faculty at Johns Hopkins University to integrate our modules into the education curriculum as part of their pre-lab learning material. We have been able to implement our lab module in a BioChemistry and an Introductory Biology laboratory course at Johns Hopkins University, exposing our platform to more than 100 students and receiving positive feedback that validated our solution.

Team Members

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Project Mentors, Sponsors, and Partners

• Dr. Anton Dahbura

• Rebecca Pearlman

• Christopher J. Devers

• Alissa Burkholder Murphy

• Chien-Ming Huang

• Ehsan Azimi

• Nassir Navab

• Jamie Young

• Eric Johnson

Course Faculty

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Project Links

• Project Poster Image

Additional Project Information