Monday, December 14, 2009

York High School Bio Club

We started the year performing a PTC Tasting PCR lab. The kids extracted their DNA, did PCR, then cut the product with a restriction enzyme. The next week we electrophoresed, and then viewed the results. Afterwards, they tasted PTC paper to compare with the results. The test results matched their ability to taste! Very cool. We watched a TED presentation of Bonnie Bassler talking about quorum sensing in bacteria. We were able to obtain some bioluminescent bacteria and plated them. This week we saw them glowing in the dark! After Winter Break we will try raising zebra fish.

Saturday, November 7, 2009

Whiting High School, Laramie, WY

Hi all....Whiting High School Bio Club members have started a recycling program. Members have expressed an interest in participating in the Science Bowl in February, and have started studying for it. They are also fundraising. 10 students from the general student body, , the Bio Club advisor, and the Student Council advisor will travel to Monterey, California in March. They will study at the Monterey Bay Aquarium and take in other sites while there. We are all having fun!

Wednesday, October 21, 2009

Osbourn Park High School starts BioClub Chapter

Osbourn Park H.S. in Manassas, VA is eagerly starting up a new Chapter of BioClub. We already have over 70 students in our club, with more inquiries weekly. Our calendar is already filled with exciting activities including Operation Turkey to help feed hungry families at Thanksgiving time, a trip to a local animal refuge to help with projects and animal care, a trip to the National Library of Medicine to tour their new exhibit, as well as scheduled opportunities to meet scientists from various fields of research in the biological science field. We also have volunteers working community events such as a bone marrow donor drive for a local leukemia patient. Our fundraising plans which include selling spiritwear with our school's Biotech Program logo to raise money to purchase materials for an introductory microarray laboratory investigation, as well as H2O testing in the stream we are adopting. We are excited to get our plans underway, and it promises to be a busy and productive year!!!

Monday, October 19, 2009

NORTHRIDGE HIGH SCHOOL NABT BIOCLUB

The Northridge High School NABT club is focusing on environmental issues. The 63 members just did a fundraiser and made almost $500 to support the paper recycling program that was started last year. Mountain High Shredding is emptying the bins every month for $30. The kids have continued and expanded the cans and plastic bottle recycling to include the middle school. By the end of this year, both programs should be totally in place. A volunteer from the community is helping to take the recyclables to the bins for the middle school's students. A trash pick up was completed Saturday (October 17) and 8 bags of trash were collected from US 20. The kids are planning a field trip to a zoo to study their endangered species programs sometime this year. We also are talking about taking a group to Washington for the Earth Day 40 Celebration in April of 2010. The students are very dedicated and doing a great job.
West High School Biology Club
Iowa City, IA

We are hosting a program by the Mac Bride Raptor Center on Thurs. Oct. 29th at our school.
This center takes in injured and abandoned raptors and feeds and rehabs these birds hopefully to be released into the wild. Some birds that are badly injured become permenant education exhibits at the center and travel around with the Raptor Center Biologists as they put on programs.
Students are also busy planning a Halloween Party and lining up speakers. Hope all of you have a great year. Its interesting to read about your activities.

Sunday, October 18, 2009

East Chapel Hill Looks Forward to a Busy Year

Our Science Club (which includes the Biology Club) has gotten off to a rip-roaring start. We have great leadership - a lot of young women this time! But, we also have some great young men. Our Biology Club leader is Rachel Hainline and she will be posting here occasionally. The students just finished a Friday night of making slime and then loading the wonderful stuff into plastic eggs (with a dinosaur included). Then on Saturday (at our annual "walk for education", the Science Clubbers manned (and womaned) a booth where young children got to throw darts at a balloon board to win "dinosaur eggs". It was very popular and brought in 170 dollars for our club. It was a cold day so the cups of hot chocolate with marshmallows for 50 cents helped also!

The money will help with our 4 teams of 18 students each that we are taking to the Regional Science Olympiad in February. We also have 2 teams of students competing in the Science Bowl and 2 teams of students competing in the Blue Heron (Ocean) Bowl in later January and early February. One subgroup of clubbers does Science Dayz - where they take little science lessons to after school programs. And another offshoot of club members does the Space Settlement Competition. They were part of the National Winners this past year.

Of course biology is a big part of these competitions. We count on our biology students to study hard for various events!

It will be an active year!

Friday, August 28, 2009

Enthusiastic students run BioClub

BioClub Midland Park High School
Midland Park
New Jersey

Last school year the newly founded BioClub consisted of freshman students who all have a passion for helping the environment. The Club is student centered and the only input I gave to get them started was information about the P2D2 prescription drug disposal program. We will continue to work on it next school year.

Other projects the students were working on were fund raisers to earn money to buy building materials for bird houses and to plant native plants on school grounds.

In the new school year we will continue to work on all our projects!

Raina Parvanov-Dawson

Monday, June 1, 2009

Another Successful Year of Biology Club

The Skyline High School biology club has just completed another great year. Highlights of this past year include performing an Elisa assay, visiting the local science center to see the LUCI fossil, dissecting sheep brains and hosting a table at the elementary school science fair. We've elected our club officers for next year, who have already begun planning for next year!

Sunday, May 31, 2009

First NABT Biology Club Book Scholarship



We at East Chapel Hill High School in North Carolina are delighted to announce that Alexandru (Alex) Bacanu won the NABT Book Scholarship. Last Wednesday, May 27, George Ros from Carolina Biological came out and presented the beautiful plaque to Alex at a big senior awards ceremony. Alex was very grateful! He can definitely use the money for his texts at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where he will be studying biology and chemistry in the fall. Alex has been integral to our Science Club. He has won numerous awards in the Science Olympiad Competition, starting in his freshman year when he was our "Don't Bug Me" expert and went to the National Science Olympiad Competition as one of only 2 freshmen on the team. He has always been a great supporter of the younger members and has done a great job tutoring and advising within our Club. He has been the leader of the Biology Club within our larger Science Club. We thank George Sellers for starting this wonderful NABT Biology Club project and we thank Carolina Biological and NABT for their generous support. - Judy Jones, advisor

Thursday, May 14, 2009

Laramie, WY end of the year

The Whiting High School, Laramie, WY Bioclub has had it's final meeting of the year. We recently toured the new, state of the art veterinary clinic in town. We have also been recycling throughout the year, and hope to expand that project next year. Many of our members will go on the year-end trip, which combines Science and Social Studies activities. We will be traveling to the Black Hills this year, and will explore Reptile Gardens, Bear Country, Cosmos, a gold mine, and go spelunking. (This is just on the science side!) Wow! The school year really flew by. Before we know it, we will be back at it again! I hope everyone has a great summer.

Jennie Lawrence
Science Teacher

Tuesday, May 12, 2009

Dukes Bio Club is winding down

We had a great year in Bio Club our first time around. We successfully raised zebra fish from fertilized eggs, our bullfrog larva became an actual frog last week (it hasn't started croaking yet...), and we created a mutant C. elegans with RNAi. We are ending the year doing a Y chromosome project. We are asking males here at school to volunteer their DNA and then we will analyze Y chromosome markers to determine where their deep ancestors migrated from. We are now trying to determine what we will follow up with next year. Ideas we have are stream monitoring, maintaining the school prairie plot, and planting some perennials on the school grounds.

Hope all of you enjoyed the club as much as we have.... enjoy your summer!

Kathy Van Hoeck
for York HS Biology Club

EcoAction in the News

Hi, All!

Saltsburg EcoAction has been so busy lately that I've been neglectful of keeping you all up to date on the great activities we have going on here. First of all, we had a lovely write up in the local paper that comprised three pages. You can see it online at http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/blairsvilledispatch/s_620952.html.

Earth Week was great for us. We cleaned up our campus, had a speaker bring in a reptile show, learned about the ecomony of homegrown veggies (and grew some of our own) and had a wonderful bash at the end.

Our Envirothon teams recently participated in the county Envirothon and ranked sixth and tenth overall. We're especially proud that our JV team came in second in the Wildlife category. Congrats to Marion Center for their first place victory!

This weekend, we're taking a canoeing and camping trip. It should be nice weather, so we're very excited.

The big news, though, is our joining PFC (Principals for Change) Greenspaces. It's a great way to network with other ecology based organizations in our area and we're very excited to have been asked to take part. If you're in our area (PA) and you're interested in an invitation to join this great group, please email me!

Friday, May 8, 2009

End of Year Updating

Thanks to the framework of BioClub! It gave me - and my students an excuse to prepare better for science fairs (2) our Science Bowl, and the Science Olympiad. Having a regular meeting that the students were in charge of and responsible for holding gave them the ownership in the process. I surveyed them about their year and their unanimous suggestion was for continuous meetings from September through March. (we had success meeting from Jan. onward) We'll see how it goes in the future.
For me and my students - knowing that other science-interested students are "out there" and actively treating science as an extra-curricular activity is compelling for us.

Greg Diersen Great Plains Lutheran HS

Tuesday, May 5, 2009

The Science Behind the News: An Online Flu Virus Lecture Hosted by the Darwin Facebook Group

Friday May 8 at 1pm Eastern time zone

Pre-register *now* to reserve your spot for this important, complimentary webinar with special guest scientists like:

- Professor Derek Smith, Professor of Infections Disease, Cambridge
University, advisor to the World Health Organization, and a leading
specialist on the flu virus. Copy and Paste these links for more information:
http://www.zoo.cam.ac.uk/zoostaff/smithd.html
http://www.antigenic-cartography.org/cam/

- Jonathan Yewdell, MD PhD, Laboratory Head, Laboratory of Viral
Disease, National Institutes of Health, and an international expert
on the flu virus and a well respected leader in science education.

- Dr. Tallman, Cleveland Clinic. Featured in the media this week,
Dr. Tallman will be able to answer questions from attendees about
the medical and clinical aspects of this swine flu outbreak.

Several others may join us including from Mexico.

This event is being hosted by the 250,000+ members of the Darwin
Facebook group and the Reading Odyssey, an informal community
dedicated to public reading, learning and discussion of science,
literature, philosophy - i.e. the big ideas of humanity.

Special thanks to the sponsors of this webinar: Citrix Online, The Cleveland Clinic, Constant Contact, Life Technologies, Scientific American.

For future events, register for our Darwin group newsletter here:
http://tinyurl.com/DarwinNewsletter

Sunday, April 26, 2009

WELCOME NEWEST NABT BIOCLUB CHAPTER

I want to welcome our newest BioClub chapter located at Trinity High School in Trinity North Carolina. The faculty advisor is Ms. Maegan Freeman.

George

Tuesday, April 21, 2009

WELCOME THE NEWEST BIOCLUB CHAPTER

I want to welcome the newest NABT BioClub Chapter--KEYSTONE NATIONAL HIGH SCHOOL--located in Bloomsburg, PA. Ms. Pamela Kreis is their faculty advisor.

George

Sunday, April 19, 2009

RNA Seadragons on board with NABT BioClub!

Hello fellow BioClub members,

Although I signed up for my Biology Club to become a BioClub member at the NABT conference in Memphis, I have had difficultly in finding the time to sit down and take all the steps to participate--I am sure that this has been the story for so many of you. After so many attempts and months, I feel like my students and I have finally arrived!

Let me start with a brief description of our school. Our school, Rickover Naval Academy, or RNA, is a relatively new public high school in Chicago. RNA opened as a new military academy in the fall of 2005 and we will be graduating our first seniors this year. We are a small school with a student body of just under 400 students and will not exceed 600.



Our biology club is relatively new so we are still finding out what we want to accomplish and our overall direction, but we have been busy. Our first goal was to hold a fundraiser just to give us the resources to pursue our interests. We made and sold holiday cards, and delivered them just before the holiday break in December.

After the fundraiser some members decided to participate in an environmental contest sponsored by the Chicago Botanic Garden, "The Fairchild Challenge." The Fairchild Challenge offers students several ways to express their attitudes or concerns about environmental issues through a variety of mediums. I have included the web site if you are interested in learning about this competition, just go to: http://www.chicagobotanic.org/fairchildchallenge



A few of my students worked on the competition, "Commercial Design, Reinventing your trash" by designing and making a tote bag from used uniform pieces, a t-shirt, overcoat and pocket from a shirt. We should find out if we are a finalists by April 20th-the awards ceremony is May 10th.



Our most recent activity was a field trip to Brookfield Zoo. In Chicago we have two very good zoos, most students go to the one in the city-Lincoln Park Zoo, and few travel to the zoo outside the city, Brookfield Zoo. On the day of the trip the weather was typical of Chicago, a combination of sunshine, clouds, snow, cold-but for us it was beautiful! We had a great time!


The next project we will doing is landscaping a few of the planting beds at the entry of our school. We received a grant from Greencorps, a division of the Chicago Department of the Environment, and are looking forward to beautifying our school's entrance and providing habitat for migrating birds, insects or other animals that come to our campus.

We will let you know how our projects go and will look forward to hearing from you.

-Pat Palmer

Wednesday, April 8, 2009

WELCOME OUR NEWEST BIOCLUB CHAPTER

Please welcome the newest BioClub Chapter! The chapter is located at Greenville Technical College, and the faculty advisor is Michael Battaglia.

Till next time--George

WARE SHOALS HIGH SCHOOL BIOCLUB

The WSHS BioClub completed its community service project by inviting the Director of the Greenwood Humane Society to speak at their last meeting in March. The students initiated a community wide effort to collect needed supplies for the humane society, and the response from the community was phenomenal. Collection containers were placed in the Ware Shoals High School library, which also serves as the community library, and the students solicited items from faculty and students. When the Director of the humane society finished her presentation, the students presented to her all the goods that they had collected. She was surprised and thrilled with what the students had done--she was not aware of their efforts before her presentation! Several students are now volunteering their time to the humane society, and the BioClub will adopt this as an ongoing project.

The BioClub students also sold shirts for Earth Day as a fund raising project. They sold over $500 of shirts and raised a lot of money for the BioClub. The money will go towards the construction of the rescue turtle habitat on campus. Look for pictures of their shirts at a later date.

Till next time--George

Saturday, March 14, 2009

NSTA National Conference

Hello Everyone! I hope everyone one is having a good year! Is anyone from our bioclub group attending the conference in New Orleans? I will be there along with one of my colleagues and would like to get together with anyone that is going. George: Can I do some recruiting? :-) Silly question!
Please post and we can make some arrangements to meet.

Cheers,
Rodger Moore~

Thursday, March 12, 2009

DENVER CONFERENCE PROPOSALS

Have you submitted your proposal for a presentation at the Denver meeting? March 15 is the deadline!! Hope to see you in Denver.

George

Wednesday, March 11, 2009

BELS Scholarship

Hi BioClubs,

NABT is now accepting applications for our new Biology Educator Leadership Scholarship. Any NABT members with <5 classroom experience is eligible, and the award is $5000 to be applied towards graduate school.

This is a great opportunity for a new teacher (or aspiring teacher) and more information can be found at http://www.nabt.org/websites/institution/index.php?p=492

Tuesday, March 10, 2009

SFXHS new Charter

We have just started a BioClub at our school. We are in the process of getting organized. We currently have a field trip planned to take go on an owl hunt at Congaree National Forest and also to spend 3 days at the beach with the entire school.

Thursday, March 5, 2009

Safety Contract Help

Hi, All! I just got my welcome packet today and I've been working on writing some by-laws for our club. The sample by-laws provided by NABT BioClub have an article on safety that mentions a "safety contract administered upon joining." I, of course, have safety contracts for my classroom, but I never thought of having one with my club. Does anyone have an example of a safety contract that they use with their club to give me some idea about how to word mine? I'd really appreciate any help I can get.

Saturday, February 28, 2009

NEWEST BIOCLUB MEMBER

I want to welcome the newest NABT BioClub Chapter--St. Francis Xavier High School in Sumter, SC. The advisor is Ms. Karlena de la Cruz. Our numbers are growing! Keep spreading the word.

Till next time--George

Tuesday, February 24, 2009

NABT BIOCLUB UPDATE

The application for the book scholarship is now posted on the NABT website in case you have misplaced the e-mail that I sent you. Please remember that it is due back to me (the original plus three copies) NO LATER THAN MARCH 15 !!! Also, only one student from each BioClub chapter can apply.

Have you submitted your proposals for the NABT Denver conference? Mid March is the deadline. Check the NABT website for details. Please be brave and submit something. It will be the best experience of your teaching career except forming a BioClub chapter! Even if you do not submit a proposal please try to attend the conference--they are a lot of fun, plus you can meet your fellow BioClub advisors.

DNA Day is fast approaching.

Till next time--George

Sunday, February 22, 2009

York High School Celebrates Darwin Day!

We had a birthday party for Charles Darwin in Bio Club and in our biology classes on Feb 12. We brought in food and drinks and watched video clips of HHMI Holiday Lectures on Evolution and Ken Miller's special lecture at HHMI. We had a lively discussion about attitudes about evolution in society today. Two of the students wrote a special rap to our man, CHUCKY-D!

We are in the process of mating zebra fish and as of Friday, we had teeny tiny little baby zebra fish in our breeding tank! Success!

Next, we are going to try to tackle some RNAi work. We have ordered RNAi feeding strains of bacteria and some C. elegans and we will just play around to see what we can do.

Thursday, February 5, 2009

NORTHRIDGE HIGH SCHOOL BIOCLUB (SCOPE)

The students of my BioClub (SCOPE) made arrangements with a portable shredding company to totally sponsor our school-wide paper recycling project. Mountain High Shredding is providing small bins for individual teachers and big bins for final collection. My SCOPE recycling committee is responsible for gathering the bins once a week and dragging them out to the curb to be emptied. Since the paper will be shredded, the confidentiality of the papers will be insured. We are advertising the company for free and sponsoring a community wide paper recycling project on April 25th. Mountain High Shredding will bring a portable shredder to the parking lot and charge 25 cents a pound for shredding personal/business paper for anyone who wants to get rid of stuff.
Our BioClub also purchased 6 big trash cans from Target, and my husband drilled holes in the tops for cans and plastic bottles. It only cost us $86 to do this, and the students are emptying them as needed and taking them to the public recycling dumpsters in town.

We made over $600 on our T-shirt sale that will be used for our Earth Week activities. The students are interested in doing water testing in the spring, so I will be using my Carolina certificates for those materials.

As you can see, my students are very active, and they are doing some great things for their school and for their community.

Dawn Kessler

Monday, February 2, 2009

Minnetonka Biology Club February Guest Speakers!



Michael Osterholm University of MN-School of Public Health

“Dr. Osterholm is director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy (CIDRAP), and associate director of the Department of Homeland Security's National Center for Food Protection and Defense (NCFPD).”



Peter Lytle
Live Green-Live Smart
“Live Green, Live Smart® is a socially responsible business, dedicated to fostering a sustainable planet by changing the way we think about, build and remodel our buildings.”





Lindsey MacDonald
Minnetonka Graduate
Hawksbill sea turtle recovery project on the Big Island of Hawaii-Project Volunteer--monitoring Hawksbill turtle activity; which included tagging turtles, marking nests, controlling predators, and helping hatchlings to the water.

Tuesday, January 27, 2009

York High School Bio Club

Hi From Illinois!

Our Bio Club has done Phagehunting (we found a virus), extracted our mitochondrial DNA and had it sequenced, and we are now on to trying to breed zebra fish. We bought genetically modified fish (orange, red and yellow GloFish) and regular wild type fish. The members want to know if the genetically modified will mate with the regular, and if they do, whether the babies will be GloFish or all wild type. Of course, we have to get them to mate first! We also bought some bullfrog tadpoles and they happily set up habitats for them. If they mate, we hope to be able to do some embryology studies. Our next project is to experiment with gene silencing (RNAi) using C. elegans.

We are a small but motivated group and we are having a lot of fun!

Friday, January 16, 2009

Darwin Day

Hi Everyone,

Happy 2009! NABT has received a lot of compliments on the BioClubs and all your hard work. Thank you all for making this adventure to much fun.

As we enter the Year of Science, I'd like to promote what certain clubs are doing for special events like Darwin Day (February 12). You can get more information about the YoS at http://www.yearofscience2009.org/home/

I try to check the blog daily, but if you club is doing something extra special, please email directly at jreevespepin@nabt.org

Thanks,

Jacki at NABT

Wednesday, January 14, 2009

Notes From George

The BioClub is off to a great start with over thirty chapters now in existence, and one of those is in Canada! It is never too late to form a chapter, so please consider forming one right now—remember the great rewards that await you and your students as members of the BioClub adventure. Please take a look at all the postings on our blog to see what great things our members are doing with their students—they are impressive. Another impressive piece of information is that our BioClubs are reaching out to approximately one thousand students at this time—now that is really exciting; think of the impact the BioClub adventure is having on students.

Charlotte, NC is an interesting city, and I was lucky to visit it recently when I attended the National Science Teachers Association Area Conference. I presented a paper on the construction of respirometers to use in the classroom, and for some reason the BioClub adventure was incorporated into my presentation! I wonder how that became part of my presentation? This brings up another good reason for becoming a BioClub adviser. While there BioClub advisers Judy Jones from NC, Leann Iacuone from SC, and I had dinner at a local Italian restaurant. We had a great time, and Leann and I made plans to get our two chapters together for a field trip and some other functions during this school year. Judy and I made plans to co-present at next year’s NABT Conference in Denver, CO. It is nice to know that you have instant BioClub adviser friends no matter where you go to a meeting. If you have questions about the BioClub please e-mail me at georges1524@gmail.com, and I will quickly answer them. Of course if you would like to save time just complete the BioClub application and send it in—it could not be any easier! I hope to receive your application very soon. Till next time—George Sellers

Monday, January 5, 2009

Minnetonka Biology Club

Minnetonka Biology Club in Minnetonka, MN has been active for about a year, but also existed in the past over a 5-year period. "The focus of Biology Club is academics....learning more about scientific techniques and applications...and having fun learning about science through field trips, speakers, and hands-on experiments. Students also have the opportunity to do individual or small group experiments to submit into scholarship competitions."

We have been busy in a collaboration with the FreshWater Society of Minnesota constructing a Rain Garden and creating adult and children's brochures about how to use/construct rain gardens. We occupy ourselves with quite a variety of activities, but this year's focus/theme has been water. Our next big project is to participate in the Fresh Water Society's "Water is Life" art contest; students are working on both still art and multimedia projects [some of which are being done in collaboration with our grade 5 partner classroom and a local senior living facility]!

Visit our web site: http://field.bio1.googlepages.com/home
---------------------------------------------------------------
Other Activities planned this year:
*Water quality testing
*Drinking Fountain Project/s
*Collaborative Research-Grade 5/Mr. Frank!
*NABT Biology Club
*Phagehunting
*Omnifest/Great Lakes
*Winter Camping
*Spring Canoe-Hike-Bike Trip
*Carleton Observatory/Sustainable Housing
*Organic farming tour/field trip
*Mitochondrial DNA Analysis
*Yeast Hyphal Growth
*Fresh Water Society Rain Garden
*Individual Research
*Science Lectures

Incarnate Word Academy - Houston

IWA Team Takes a First Place at Winston Science in Dallas, Texas





A team of six seniors from Incarnate Word Academy won first place on November 22 at the annual Build-A-Dinosaur competition at the national Winston Science event in Dallas.
The team competed against 18 other public and private high schools to create a scale model of a dinosaur using only cardboard and duct tape in eight hours. The purpose of the competition is to provide an opportunity for contestants to better understand how paleontologists assemble and mechanically support a large dinosaur. Members of the IWA science and engineering club, headed by teachers Daniel Bryant and Mary McGivern, participated in the project, which focuses on teamwork, problem-solving, concepts of scale and mechanical engineering.


The first-place winners at the Build-A-Dinosaur Winston Science event, all from the class of 2009, include (left to right) Andrea Romero, Simarjeet Grewal, Lindsey Stryk, Allison Schimelpfening, Nataly Rodriguez, and Erica Williams.

Find out more about Winston Science at the following URL: http://winstonscience.org/wsci/

Sunday, January 4, 2009

Helena High BioClub

Greetings from Helena, Montana

The Helena High BioClub was formed in the fall of 2008.  We hold regular meetings during lunch on the 1st and 3rd Wednesday of the month.  We have invited a number guest speakers to talked about their careers and porfessional interests.  This has included local infectious disease specialists, hydrologists, wildlife rehab specialists, bear researchers, physical therapists and others.  We are also raising money to fund field trips, designing a native garden at Helena High and helping to fund international clean drinking water projects with our local high school Green Group.