Pixel International Conferences

Nine students aged 16 to 19 took part in a XLAB science camp in Göttingen (Germany) in October 2019 entitled “What do Legionella, EHEC and Botox have in common?”. In order to answer this question, the underlying scientific concepts such as the transport mechanism across biomembranes and as the basis of that the self-assembly of lipids to bilayer were developed during the five days of the camp based on the heterogeneous prior knowledge of the participants. Using specific developed experiments and information materials [1, 2], the students acquired both the scientific principles and the important research method of fluorescence microscopy independently. Therefore, the phenomena of color and fluorescence were systematically investigated from a chemical and physical point of view. On the last day, the learned contents were applied to the pathogens Legionella pneumophila, EHEC (enterohemorrhagic Escherichia coli) and Botulinum toxin (Botox) by comparing Adapted Primary Literature on current research on SNARE-mediated exocytosis at the presynapse [3] with a newspaper article on medical research on Botox. By analysis of scientific communication, an authentic insight into the work of a scientist is given in addition to the experiments [4, 5]. An accompanying questionnaire study examined the changes in the participants' understanding of the nature of science.

Keywords: Adapted Primary Literature, nature of science, science camp, biomembrane.

References:

[1] Dege, J., Irmer, E., Steinkuhle, A., Steinem, C. & Waitz, T. (2016). Vom Tensid zur Biomembran. Praxis der Naturwissenschaften - Chemie in der Schule, 65 (2), 5-10.
[2] Hoff, E. von, Toy, S., Waitz, T. & Mey, I. (2019). Experiment on the Self-Aggregation of Amphiphiles. World Journal of Chemical Education, 7 (2), 185-188.
[3] Kuhlmann, J. W., Junius, M., Diederichsen, U. & Steinem, C. (2017). SNARE-Mediated Single-Vesicle Fusion Events with Supported and Freestanding Lipid Membranes. Biophysical Journal, 112 (11), 2348-2356.
[4] Hoff, E. von, Aljets, H., Milsch, N., Waitz, T. & Mey, I. (2019). Arbeiten mit Adaptierter Primärliteratur im Chemieunterricht. CHEMKON, 26 (5), 190-193.
[5] Yarden, A., Norris, S. P. & Phillips, L. M. (2015). Adapted primary literature. The use of authentic scientific texts in secondary schools. Dordrecht: Springer.