I-Corps L to discover a sustainable model that will support and scale BioBuilder's curriculum and teacher professional development activities

BioBuilder是一个课程和教师培训项目，其目标是为高中学生和教师提供研究性课程。BioBuilder目前专注于合成生物学的新兴领域，并于2011年开始了27名教师的教师培训计划。现在，它已经发展到有来自40多个州和14个国家的500多名教师。早期的成功与真实性激发学生兴趣和教师参与的观念是一致的，但人们也认识到，教师不是课程采用中唯一或最有影响力的声音。尽管看到了早期的积极反应，但该项目需要更好地了解市场力量，这些力量可以导致引人注目的教育产品。参与I-Corps L项目的目标是进行客户发现，以探索扩展和维持对BioBuilder编程和教师发展产品的需求。BioBuilder为合成生物学和生物工程的新兴领域提供了新颖和示范的教学模式。BioBuilder是一门由教师指导的课程，旨在弥合科学课堂和大学研究之间的差距。其目标是将专业人士所做的科学和工程与这些科目在高中的教学方式联系起来。通过以可访问的、模块化的和可教的形式呈现真实的研究问题，BioBuilder实现了其激发人们对科学和工程的兴趣、参与和理解的使命。还有一系列的专业发展研讨会，由一名大学教员和一名受过生物建造培训的K-12教育工作者共同领导。通过这种方式，BioBuilder既可以向全国观众传播其课程，也可以培养一个由教师领导组成的积极参与的社区。

BioBuilder is a curriculum and a teacher training program which was established with the goal of bringing investigative curriculum to high school students and teachers. BioBuilder currently focuses on the emerging field of synthetic biology and started its teacher-training program with 27 teachers in 2011. It has grown to now involve more than 500 teachers in 40+ states and 14 foreign countries. Early success has been consistent with a notion that authenticity sparks student interest and teacher engagement, but it is also recognized that teachers are not the sole or most influential voice in curriculum adoption. Despite the early positive response seen, the project needs to better understand the market forces that can lead to a compelling educational product. The goal in participating with the I-Corps L program is to perform customer discovery to explore scaling and sustaining the appetite seen for BioBuilder's programming and teacher development offerings. BioBuilder provides novel and exemplary pedagogical models to the emerging field of synthetic biology and biological engineering. BioBuilder is a teacher-informed curriculum that has been developed to bridge the gap between science classrooms and university research. The goal is to connect the science and engineering done by professionals to the way these subjects are taught in high schools. By presenting authentic research questions in accessible, modular, and teachable form, BioBuilder fulfills its mission to spark interest, engagement and understanding in science and engineering. There is also a series of professional development workshops co-led by a university faculty member and a BioBuilder-trained K-12 educator. In this way BioBuilder can both disseminate its curriculum to a nationwide audience and also foster an engaged community of teacher leaders.