Spira Day 13: Breaking Bones & Fixing Hearts

Today was another exciting day as we rounded up our Biomedical Engineering section! For the morning half, Professor Coulombe took over as she taught the girls about her work in Heart Tissue Engineering. Professor Coulombe works with researching and creating heart tissue from stem cells for fixing damaged hearts. She used the morning to not only talk about her research and work but also teach the girls a little about the heart as well as give the campers a tour of her Heart Tissue Lab located right here on Brown's Campus! After this wonderful tour and talk we treated the girls to lunch and games out on the Main Green of Brown's campus. The second half of camp was spent on talking about bones and bone fractures. After the lesson we gave the girls a variety of supplies ranging from plaster to duct tape to create a cast or splint for a broken chicken bone. We allowed each girl to break the bones and see how much weight a chicken bone can take before it breaks completely in half. Afterwards they were given full creative reign to design and construct their own cast or splint for the broken chicken bone! Tomorrow morning we will be testing the casts to see which is the strongest and allow the girls to discuss their thought processes as part of tomorrow's Do Now and end of Biomedical week! Can't wait!