Teaching & Outreach
Our lab members are interested in teaching, education, and outreach activities. Below, you'll find posts from lab members about teaching and outreach activities they have developed or adapted for different audiences, from K-12 to university classrooms. These also include example documents, hand-outs, protocols, and helpful links. Scroll to learn more!
Can You Move Like a Microbe? A Bacterial Migration Activity for the Delaware Museum of Nature and Science
By Victoria Muir (Last updated Summer 2025)
The Delaware Museum of Nature and Science (DelMNS) is a public museum dedicated to inspiring exploration and discovery of the natural world through immersive exhibits, educational programs, and scientific research at all ages. Being a lifelong local to Delaware, since 2017 I have worked with DelMNS on STEM outreach and education activities, including many, many hands-on slime and hydrogel demos with museum guests! Recently, we developed a hands-on interactive activity for the DelMNS Discovery Gallery called Can You Move Like a Microbe?, where museum visitors use a magnetic wand to guide a “bacterium” through four different obstacle paths, each representing a natural environment where bacteria move: smooth water (pink), sticky surfaces (blue), mazes to find food (green), and porous media (yellow). The hands-on challenge highlights how different habitats present unique physical barriers to bacterial movement, helping participants explore how microbes navigate the world around them!
We designed the activity from an upcycled gameboard of the game Klask (which, if you've never played, I highly recommend!). We designed four sections of environments, and printed inserts to fit the Klask game board using a Bambu Labs A1 3D printer. See link to all the .stl files here. The pathway inserts were adhered to the gameboard using glue. We also used the magnetic Klask game pieces, removing the top stem, and adhered 3D printed "bacterium" figures for the activity. A huge shout out to my husband Rob Pifer who helped take our vision for this game and turn it into reality with his printing and assembly expertise! We also created signage to accompany the activity, available here.
Museum guests can use the magnetic wand to guide the bacterium through the four environments. The museum educators added colorful and functional crocheted magnet holders to the exhibit to make keeping track of the magnets easier and improve overall activity safety. The activity is located in the museum's Discovery Gallery, which is staffed full time by a museum educator who can help guide guests of all ages through activities. Our lab members will also frequently visit the museum to engage with guests during the activity.
Putting this activity together was a really fun and educational experience! It has got us thinking about using games as outreach activities and what other concepts and demos we could design with 3D printing. Interested in creating this activity? Please use any of the resources in this post, and let us know how it goes! Reach out at vmuir@udel.edu.
Alginate Hydrogels for Drug Delivery - An In Class Activity for University Students
By Victoria Muir (Last updated Summer 2025)
In Spring 2025, I taught a university course in chemical engineering on Mammalian Cell Rate Processes and Dynamics (CHEG843). The course was 2 credit hours and open to undergraduate and graduate students in chemical engineering at University of Delaware, with 10 students enrolled in the course. We met twice per week for ~1.5 hours, for eight weeks, in a standard classroom (e.g., seats with desks, chalkboard, projector). In general, each week consisted of one lecture period and one in-class activity period, where students worked in groups of 2-3 to complete an in-class activity that covered the material from the lecture. This included coding activities, literature searches, online lab simulations through LabXchange, and my personal favorite activity - developing alginate hydrogels for drug delivery!
I developed this activity inspired by an alginate "slime worm" activity I've been using in outreach for many years (adapted from the many great alginate outreach activities available online, some examples from ACS here and Jackie Means The STEM Queen on CBS Mission Unstoppable here), and extending to university level concepts in biomaterials engineering in a fun way. In this activity, students formed sodium alginate hydrogels by combining solutions of sodium alginate (+ food dye) with solutions of calcium chloride to form an alginate hydrogel via ionic crosslinking. We also explored diffusion of "small molecules" (i.e., food dye) vs. "large molecules, nanoparticles, and cells" (i.e., glitter) in alginate hydrogels, making analogies to drug and cell delivery. Lastly, students "hand printed" scaffolds using squeeze bottles full of sodium alginate solution, and we drew parallels to bioprinting through discussion questions.
Students followed along in a worksheet, which I've included here. I've also included an example completed version of the assignment, which students turned in for weekly homework. Lastly, I've included a supply list and procedures for the instructor to prepare the activity here. While these materials are all food grade and can be handled without gloves, students were given nitrile gloves during the activity to prevent food dye from staining hands and reduce any drying or irritation that can come from calcium chloride salt water. This was optional, as the alginate slime worms activity is fully kitchen-grade and widely used safely with a K-12 audience (see Steve Spangler example here).
Overall, the students really liked this activity, and commented on how seeing and feeling hydrogels made a big difference in their understanding of drug delivery kinetics and material design. For many students in the class, this was their first time working with biomaterials and hydrogels hands-on. When it came time for their final projects, many students worked on hydrogel-based topics, which they said were inspired by the in-class activity we did in the middle of the semester. And a highlight of this activity - we made a mega slime worm that spanned the length of the whole classroom :)
In the future, I'm considering multiple ways of adapting the activity. In the current version, due to time constraints in the semester, I had students think about how they would turn their dye diffusion experiments into quantitative data. In the future, I'd like to allow more time for this activity, and have students actually use ImageJ to quantify food dye color intensity over time, and compare the kinetics to typical drug release curves. In the context of how I ran the class this year and other projects going on for at-home work, I ran this assignment so that it could be completed from start to finish within one class period (timing worked well, it took about 1 h as is, and left some time to play around with hydrogel slime). In the future, I'd plan ahead in the course to have complementary at-home activities, like reading that use alginate hydrogels for drug delivery to connect to the literature. Soon, I'd also like to construct a Printess bioprinter (by the lab of Prof. Mark Skylar-Scott at Stanford) for use in the classroom to allow students to gain hands-on experience with bioprinting, though this would be over multiple class periods and likely in a dedicated lab teaching environment. This has also inspired me to think about how I can convert other teaching topics into hands-on demos that are friendly for a standard classroom setting.
Interested in using or adapting this activity in your class? Feel free to use any of these resources, and please let me know how it goes (ideally with pictures of slime worms). Reach out at vmuir@udel.edu!