Bright and early on Saturday, March 7th, the Bioengineering Graduate Society (BEGS) and other volunteers set up their booths at the San Diego Festival of Science and Engineering in Petco Park to show local K-12 students the wonders of science and engineering. The energy in the ballpark was buzzing as we prepared for a full day of science, learning, and fun. BEGS and the undergraduate bioengineering society, BMES, were representing UCSD side by side as the 17,806 attendees passed by throughout the day.

     At the BEGS booth, students started by learning about stem cells and how every cell in your body can trace its lineage back to a stem cell, but eventually differentiated into each cell type that makes you, you! This differentiation process can be driven by the stiffness of the material surrounding the stem cell. For example, a stem cell on stiff material will differentiate into a stiff cell type, like a bone cell. A stem cell on a very soft material will differentiate into a soft cell type, like a brain cell. We then had the students close their eyes and feel different materials, predicting what cell type stem cells would differentiate into if it were growing on that material. Some of the kids really were excited about the demo and wanted to take a guess at all 8 of our mock materials. After the demo, the students then got to build their own biomaterial scaffold complete with cells, an extracellular matrix, and of course, googly eyes. Some of the students made big pink brains, some made classic red hearts, but most made extremely fibrotic tumors (which are the most fun to make).

two girls with twin fibrotic tumors (in a good way) Sarah in the back running the touching and guessing demo and Noemie in the front helping with the arts and crafts. It got a little chaotic ngl.

     With their biomaterial scaffold in hand, they moved to our next activity where they learned about the electrical activity of the heart. Even kindergartners know that your heart is in your chest and it pumps blood to your body, but most students were stumped when we asked them how the heart pumps. Their eyes widened as they learned about how our heart uses electricity to contract and then expand, and how we can measure this electrical activity to see the heartbeat and diagnose medical conditions using a machine called an ECG. We then gave electrical leads to the students and had them attach them to disposable electrodes on both sides of their body to hook them up to our homemade ECG. When they held very still, they saw their heartbeat arise out of the noise on the computer screen in front of them. We explained to them the meaning of the different peaks on the reading, and how the readings changed whenever they moved or spoke. It was awesome to see the realization come to them as they saw their heartbeat in real time. They could feel their heart beat in their chest while seeing the spikes simultaneously on the screen. For the grand finale, we hooked up our homemade ECG to a receipt printer and printed their ECG results on a piece of receipt paper for them to take home. This was honestly my favorite part of the activity because the kids were always super surprised that we had a take home for them and that it was unique to them! Just like how adults are kind of nuts about their personal health data, kids are too!

A really happy kid in front of his ECG readout. His dad was great at placing the leads. Turns out he is an anesthesiologist! Yiyan explaining the ECG signal to a kid Printed ECG results (but an early attempt, hence the weird signal)

     Their hands full of biomaterial scaffolds and ECG results, the students parted from our booth to explore the other booths at the festival, which included exhibitors like Illumina, Millipore Sigma, Biocom, and many more. The event was a real treat to attend this year and we had record attendance at our booth. It was a joy seeing the students getting excited and engaging with such different types of bioengineering and realizing how complex and beautiful the human body is. We can’t wait to go again next year!

     As an aside, I am quite proud of the ECG and receipt printer demo. My colleague and good friend Rai did almost all of the hardware work and polished off the software I made. It was cool to make something from scratch with a friend. It also put a lot of smiles on kids (and adults) faces. I am excited to bring more ideas to life in the near future!