COE Design was asked to create an education video for Salk’s award-winning Education Outreach program’s video based curriculum. The Salk Education Outreach provides San Diego elementary, middle and high school students with critical hands-on science education. This program provides tools and resources teachers need and want to better serve their students. In a series of highly interactive workshops, teachers working with Education Outreach staff determined that in addition to exposing students to current science research, their primary aim would be teaching students to think like scientists.
To capitalize on the successful strategy of having high school students as ‘stars’ in the video, we leveraged an existing summer high school internship program, the Heithoff Brody Summer Scholars, to provide the content and personnel for the video filmed at the end of the 2017 internship. The thirteen minute video, portrayed like a YouTube video, follows a high school student and her Molecular Neurobiology Lab mentor through her internship as they investigate autism.
COE Design orchestrated the videographer team and together planned, scripted, directed and produced the video. Filmed in one day so we did not interrupt the lab’s research, a 3-camera team followed the pair through the experiment and what a student could expect. Our focus on the planning stages was important to emphasize in this experiment, as the step by step process is crucial to a successful outcome. Students reported that seeing other students “like them” doing the experiments made it easier to imagine themselves in that role and prompted deeper analysis of the experimental steps.
You can see the video at https://vimeo.com/251553188
The Salk Institute for Biological Studies, established in 1960, is an internationally recognized independent research institute dedicated to world-class basic biological research. The Institute is equally dedicated to community outreach, particularly education programs serving students throughout the San Diego community.
