Day 19-crunch time

As a team, Rebecca, Stephanie and I have really begun to knock out our project. We were able to borrow some supplies from the Physics department and have begun to practice our lab that the students will be doing to go along with our project. It took a bit of time and work to get the kinks out of it, but we are ready to bring our newly gained knowledge back to the classroom and have a fun activity to relate real-world science applications to our math classrooms. We are still working to be ready for our presentation 1 week from today, but are excited to show off all that we have learned.

Day 18- poster and project time

I came into the center for Biological Physics today with a more positive attitude and an excitement to continue on developing our curriculum for our classroom while continuing to progress on our poster. We had a lecture this morning by Daniel Barr on molecular dynamics, time steps, and simulations. It was difficult to focus on the lecture because we each wanted to dive into our curriculum now that we have such great ideas to push forth in our classrooms. Now that we have gotten our idea that is the purpose of the program, it is difficult not to focus on this every second!

Day 17- The Biodesign center

Today we had the privilege of touring the biodesign center with Dr. Stuart Lindsay. On this tour, we were able to witness the many open labs which are specially designed to facilitate communication between the different research groups and encourage collaboration rather than just working individually with one's research group. This allows for greater opportunity to advance because there are more people to tap into and those with specialties in one area can help to bridge gaps in understanding for researchers in another field or another area of the field.

After the tour, we broke into our small groups and bounced ideas around for our curriculum project and began developing our project. We had our official "aha" moment today and began to compile our curriculum ideas because we have a hook to bring in our students and tie our math into their world and the world of science at the same time. We are operating on the principle that math is the language of science, so without math, you cannot understand and use science fully. With this statement we are ready to bring science and a relevancy of math back into our high school math classrooms!

Day 16-Forming our groups

Today, we officially divided into our poster/project groups. Dr. Ozkan helped us to finalize our teams as well as our researcher whom would help us with the details of our project. We have decided to work with Daniel Barr, a graduate student of Arjan van der Vaart. He has been a big help to us thus far in taking the research done in the center and translating it into a form of information which we could understand. I am excited but also a little nervous because our posters are due a week from today and we are still struggling to come up with a hook to bring in our students and show them the ties between math and research science. In addition, what I am really hoping to take out of this project is the knowledge of all that is left to discover in the field of science. So many students are discouraged by the field of science because they do not realize how much is left to be discovered. This program has shown me how much is available for our students to contribute to the world of science.

Day 15- Starting week 4

Today I started in the CBP with a bit more stress than usual. I have realized how close to an end we are with our time at ASU, but I am still struggling with the concepts of my research and how to apply this in the classroom. Today's lecture was given by Dr. Arjan van der Vaart. He gave us a deeper understanding of molecular dynamics and the reason for doing this rather than lab research. Some of the benefits include cost, rarity of certain materials, prevention of exposure to dangerous chemicals, and more detail into changes that happen over such a short period of time that they would not be readily observed in an experiment. We have started to form groups and will decide on researchers tomorrow, which gives me hope for completing our project in a way that it will truly help my students to understand the practical applications of geometry and algebra in the fields of science, primarily physics and biology.

Day 14- end of week 2

Today we worked with Dr. Michael Thorpe again on structural rigidity and formation of proteins. The popsicle stick model has led to a well developed formula for determining the degrees of freedom of any structure based on the number of atoms and the number of bonds. This is a great algebraic and geometric concept that I hope to implement in my classroom this school year. I am still struggling to come up with my own, unique model of tying this into my classroom, but hopefully, as we join our own researcher next week, we will be able to bounce ideas off of one another in smaller groups and be ready to go!

Day 13

Today was another valuable day with Dimitry. We discussed more modeling software, which is great for visualizing the actual workings of the proteins. The only difficulty I am having with this is that we have been exposed to so many protein modeling software programs, but have just had a brief overview with each of these. I am hoping that next week, when we divide up with our actual researcher, we will work with just one visualization program and be comfortable with this rather than just having an overview of many programs with no actual deep understanding of how to best use each program.

Day 12- Dr.Thorpe, popsicle sticks, and Polytechnic campus

Today was my "light bulb" day in the Center for Biological Physics. We met Dr. Michael Thorpe for the first time today. This was also the day that we were truly able to benefit from our mentor teachers from last year. This group had created an activity about rigid and non-rigid structures of proteins using Popsicle sticks of different lengths. Then, the mathematical counting principle of determining the degrees of freedom came into play. This was an exciting day for me because it is all finally starting to come together. I now am seeing ideas that could play well in my Geometry classroom.

After this, our afternoon was spent at the Polytechnic campus. My favorite part of the day while visiting the Polytechnic campus was the LARB, or the Lab for Algae Research and Biotechnology. In this lab, they are growing different types of algae to determine beneficial uses for this such as an alternative energy source. This was exciting because it is actual research happening that is a hand's on experience.

Day 11- Dr. Ozkan

Today's lecture got into the specific details of why protein folding is such an important field of study. Protein folding is an important concept because if we can figure out how and why proteins fold the way that they do, then we can figure out why they misfold and what can be done to correct misfoldings of proteins. After this is done, we can better develop drugs to overcome this protein misfolding that results in diseases such as alzheimer's disease. After this, in order to help with compiling ideas for our projects, we discussed some mathematical applications such as calculating the angles between atoms on the protein chains. This is a bit higher of a mathematical concept than my course addresses, but it did get the ideas flowing for some possible projects involving angles, polyhedrons, and 3-dimensional shapes that mimic formation of proteins. I have some ideas regarding transformations of atoms to form amino acid chains, and the resulting proteins as an applicable geometry project.