Students at Summer Camp 2008

During this camp, students became a part of a medical team dedicated to a difficult task and wonderful new challenge. A local star athlete had a damaged joint and traditional attempts at repair were unable to restore him to peak performance. Students worked in teams to go where no surgeon has gone before and attempted to fabricate NEW tissue to replace the athlete’s damaged joint.

Each team of students became their own biotechnology company and created their own logo. See the company logos:

Arm Growing Co.
Bio-Techs
Cell Maker
Kleenex
Light Bulb Bio-Tech Incorporation
LJ Regenerating Tissue
Starfish Inc.
TE Tech
Team Tissue Engineering
The Gamma Rays
Tissue Stars
TS Tissue Engineering of the 21st Century

Build-A-Bone Bone Strength Competition

Every single person has a skeleton made up of lots of bones (206 of them to be exact!) These bones keep your body in the right shape, allow you to move the way you do, and protect the organs that make the rest of your body work. If you didn't have bones, you would just be a pile of mush on the ground!

The bone is a rich tissue covered in capillaries and the bone marrow is a marvelous factory for new cells--stem cells--that have the ability to become new blood, brain, bone, and heart cells. During camp, students were given limited tools and asked to build the strongest bone construct that they could.

Working in the Laboratory

In research today, teams of cutting-edge biomedical researchers are beginning to find the answers to help humans tap into their innate ability to regenerate damaged, diseased, or compromised body parts. Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine are revolutionary technologies that offer incredible hope to people with compromised tissue function. At camp, students conducted lab tests much like those performed by multi-disciplinary teams of biologists, chemists, physicists, engineers, computer specialists, and physicians.







Winners

Everyone is a winner at Summer Camp! Overall and during week 1, the girls were most victorious. During week 2, the boys were unsurpassed.

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The project described is partially funded by a Science Education Partnership Award from the National Center for Research Resources, a component of the National Institutes of Health (Grant Number 1 R25 RR023286), and its contents are solely the responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official views of NCRR or NIH.