Spira Day 11: Pill Coating & Bio-Mechanics

Today we continued our chemistry engineering topic and allowed that to move into our next section on biomedical/bioengineering by introducing biochemical engineering! In the morning we started off with a lesson on the digestive system and how biochemical engineers use this information when creating medicine. We discussed how pill coating is a special area looked at by engineers because engineers want to construct a coating that is easy to swallow but dissolves in stomach acid the fastest in order to quickly dispense medicine throughout the body. After discussing this with the girls we gave them their own try at pill coating! We supplied the campers with corn starch, water, oil, and sugar with skittles as the medicinal pill to "coat" and allowed them to create their own pill coating for the skittle. With their creation they were able to race and see who's mixture would dissolve the fastest in diet sprite (our mock stomach acid). The girls had so much fun experimenting with the different properties of the the various materials we gave them.

Afterwards we had a lovely guest speaker-- Max Monn, a current graduate student in Mechanical Engineering at Brown. He was able to talk to the girls about his project for his PhD and how he is using inspiration from nature and our environment (bio-inspiration) in order to study the properties of substances like glass and find ways to improve them. The girls were absolutely fascinated and loved looking through his research. More to folllow as we move through Chemical/Biomedical week