14-07-2025
North Carolina A&T State University provides biotechnology resources for teachers in the Triad
GREENSBORO, N.C. (WGHP) — It's called the Amgen Biotech Experience and for a number of teachers across the Piedmont, it could be the key to helping their students learn all about biotechnology. They have come to North Carolina A&T State University for two days of intensive training on how to better help their students learn all about bio-tech and how to use it in their classroom lessons. That includes online learning, resources and contacts that show how the procedures they are learning now are applied in real life.
According to North Carolina A&T Associate Professor of Biology Dr. Misty Thomas, 'We then split half of our time in the actual lab. So, we ran all our teachers through all the protocols, all the experiments that they would be doing with their students. And we also make sure that in the lab, they have all the exact materials they're going to have in their classroom. So that way then they've touched everything. They've played with everything. They've gone through all of the labs, so they're better prepared to then take it into their classroom.'
The university has also put together lab kits with everything the teachers will need to conduct experiments in their own classrooms.
'They can borrow the kit for three weeks, take it with them, do all their labs, and they give it back to us. We turn the kit over, and then we give it to a new teacher. So they're constantly going out week after week,' says Dr. Thomas.
For the teachers, it is an incredible resource. This will be the third year Kimberly Griffis has used the program in her classroom. She says her students love it.
'The great thing about it is they get excited about science,' says Griffis. 'You have scholars who might not be so excited about it at first. But when you implement hands-on activities in the classroom, they get so excited, and they look forward to coming to school every day because they don't know what's going to happen in the classroom with science. And so when they're able to pretend to be a forensic science or crime scene investigator or just a scientist or a lab technician, they get so excited they learn how to collaborate with one another and work together in teams.'
She says the lab kits are so versatile, they can be incorporated for use in many different subjects.
According to Griffis, 'It's amazing because you're even with the pop heading when we do the DNA activity, you could do multiplication with it. You can do addition with it. So, you can incorporate math and all that. We've even used this program to do a crime scene unit at our school, where we set up the crime scene and they had to figure out who committed the crime. We involved our community resources, such as the Greensboro CSI police, you know, with the Police Department. They came to our school, they talked about how they solve crimes and they did the fingerprinting and stuff.'
The best part of all, according to NC A&T Biology Professor Dr. Joseph Lewis Graves, Jr., the program and training is entirely free.
'We provide them not only the professional equipment, but all of the training and all the supplies are paid for through the Amgen award. So none of this comes out of their pocket and we can reimburse them for their time being trained to be able to deliver this material to their kids,' he said.
Dr. Graves sees this partnership only growing with time.
'What we want is for these kids, when they go through their training in the public schools, we want them to consider coming to us as students,' he said. 'So, we're engaged in North Carolina. We want to keep North Carolina kids in North Carolina schools and we want people to understand that North Carolina A&T is one of the research powerhouses in the state of North Carolina.'
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