Takin' it to the streets - Short Stuff - MobileLab to teach science to Boston middle and high school students - Brief Article

Girls' Life, August-Sept, 2003

What if science class came on wheels? Traveling all over the land, bringing instruction, education teachers! Sound scary? Well, staffers at the Boston University School of Medicine thought the idea was pretty great and so MobileLab was born. The lab has taken to the streets to teach science to more than 20,000 Boston area middle and high school students.

It's not only a bus but a self-contained molecular biology laboratory. In it, up t 24 students and their teacher, enter the wonderful world of laboratory investigating...and it's cool enough to make us all want to become science whizzes! Experiments are linked to real-life sitches and presented as mysteries. So, to crack. The Mystery of the Crooked Cell, young biologists use processes like DNA fingerprinting to identify sickle cell anemia. The bus is packed with science gear, including video cams, bio-freezers and anything else you future scientists could need. The venture has been so successful that some states are following in MobileLab's tracks. Universit y of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has a science lab roaming the streets and, in the works, are a BioBus in Connecticut and Maryland's MdBioLab.