Lab-on-a-chip workshop activities for secondary school students

Abstract

The ability to engage and inspire younger generations in novel areas of science is important for bringing new researchers into a burgeoning field, such as lab-on-a-chip. We recently held a lab-on-a-chip workshop for secondary school students, for which we developed a number of hands-on activities that explained various aspects of microfluidic technology, including fabrication (milling and moulding of microfluidic devices, and wax printing of microfluidic paper-based analytical devices, so-called μPADs), flow regimes (gradient formation via diffusive mixing), and applications (tissue analysis and μPADs). Questionnaires completed by the students indicated that they found the workshop both interesting and informative, with all activities proving successful, while providing feedback that could be incorporated into later iterations of the event.

Design of problem-based learning activities in the field of microfluidics for 12- to 13-year-old participants—Small Plumbing!: empowering the next generation of microfluidic engineers

“…All pupil groups delivered a successful design and were able to satisfactorily evaluate the performance of the device during the testing session, indicating that, despite microfluidics being a new concept to the majority of pupils (only two pupils surveyed had heard of microfluidics prior to the project), it is possible to engage them in this kind of problem-based learning approach with microfluidics. From the questionnaire, 84 % of pupils reported that they liked the activities, similar to the reported satisfaction with short workshops of a more traditional science festival outreach nature (Esfahani et al 2016). However, the advantage of the PBL approach was allowing the schoolchildren the opportunity for deeper learning of microfluidics and greater ownership of the projects/activities.…”

“…7. All these considerations show that the pupils are very keen on the relevance of this type of project (Esfahani et al 2016). Towards the 3rd month, a team from one of the school, accompanied by one of their teachers, came to visit our mechanical workshops and participate in the fabrication of the microfluidic chips.…”

“…A wide range of microfluidics-based outreach activities have been designed and delivered, targeting age groups from university education through to young children and families at science festivals, an overview of which is given in a recent Biomicrofluidics paper (Esfahani et al 2016). Some activities demonstrate microfluidic principles by taking a fun "mocked-up" or scaled-up approach using materials like Lego (Jimenez et al 2015), modelling clay (Jimenez and Bridle 2015), Jell-O (Yang et al 2010) and chocolate (Esfahani et al 2016). Others allow participants to use microfluidics to undertake diagnostics or other example experiments illustrating the potential application areas (Hemling et al 2014).…”

Chemical and biochemical analysis on lab-on-a-chip devices fabricated using three-dimensional printing

“…Meanwhile, reduced price, has paved the way to the exploration of additive manufacturing as an alternative to traditional 2D fabricating methods typically used before. Except for these printing methods, two-photon polymerization [80][81][82], direct-write techniques [83], inkjet [84], micro-milling [85,86], and bio-printing technologies [87,88] have been widely used as well. More useful information could be found in previous published reviews [28,[89][90][91].…”

Micro‐injection molding of thermoplastic polymers: Proposal of a constitutive law as function of the aspect ratios

“…A permanent challenge addressed to the plastic industries is to reduce the dimensions of polymeric micro‐parts (with a weight in the order of milligrams) or micro‐structures on polymer substrates with sub‐micron dimensions . Such features have been reached in the research laboratories, using specific polymers, including poly(dimethylsiloxane), molded on a micro‐featured substrate .…”