When is science the most fun?

When you are doing  it.

Discovery is what science is all about. And that is what BCM 341 is all about. BCM 341 is a place to learn and engage with biochemistry as it is being done – today. We learn not only how modern biochemistry is being done, but also how to ask questions of our own.

I wrote a paper about this course in 2011, but it is changing still. It is part of my most recent NSF proposal, so I can interject a new research project into the laboratory component.

If you’ve done science, you know that there is much of the mundane alongside the inspirational. I found that most of that “mundane” was sucking my time away in the teaching laboratory. I didn’t want to be spending all my time in the teaching laboratory showing students how to operate a specific piece of instrumentation…what buttons to push, how many washes, etc. So I started recording myself – using my iPad – operating instrumentation and executing basic technique. I make students watch these videos before lab, so that they know how to operate the UV-Vis – for example – before coming to class, making data interpretation possible and meaningful.

That initial idea has mushroomed into a fairly large archive of research and teaching instrumentation and technique for the organic and biochemistry teaching lab, and the biochemistry research lab.

You see the video collection here.