The 21st-century biology laboratory is being handed over to computer mice by an interdisciplinary team of Stanford researchers. A project called the Interactive Biology Cloud Lab, led by assistant professor of bioengineering Ingmar Riedel-Kruse and assistant professor of education Paulo Blikstein, enables students and teachers at many different educational levels to participate in lab experiments online, using remote-control software to stimulate and observe activity by microorganisms.
“We are certainly the first ones to enable real-time interactivity online with biology,” says Riedel-Kruse, adding that the team is also at the forefront of planning high-speed network access that would allow one room of 250 experimentation nodes to serve a million students each year. “There is no precedent of millions of students doing experiments online,” notes Riedel-Kruse, who expects that to change rapidly. He put the highest number achieved so far by any researchers at “about 1,000-plus over longer periods of time.”
Stanford’s cloud lab allows students to vary the intensity and angle of light-emitting diodes—interactivity that’s meant to increase the sense of engagement for participants—and observe the reactions of a one-celled organism via a webcam microscope. Middle-school students were among the testers for the lab, conducting real-time classroom experiments in which the light changes and microorganism behavior were projected on a wall for group discussion.
Setting up the lab was technically challenging, say the researchers, but the potential benefit is as cost-efficient as it is educationally dramatic: Scaled up to serving a million students annually, the cost of the lab experiments would be 1 cent each.
