In keeping with their name, BiteScis is focused on creating simple, easy-to-implement lessons for educators that explain scientific fundamentals in fun and engaging ways. In celebration of their wonderful learning resources being added to LabXchange, we spoke with BiteScis co-founder and project director Stephanie Keep to learn more about the organization and their work!
Our Mission: To empower educators and researchers to inspire students with the creativity and diversity of real science.
Our Vision: Classrooms where every student knows what science is and feels connected to how science works.
Our organization strives to make science research accessible to all. We use the stories and research of diverse scientists as the foundation to engaging, challenging, and cool science lessons that any teacher could use to reach their students. Each lesson is shaped through participation of science researchers and science educators we call BiteScientists. Our lessons are unlike anything that exists in the crowded field of classroom resources. Each lesson works to expand definitions of what science is, what it does, and who scientists are. We feature the diversity and creativity of authentic science while also helping students to master the content they are required to learn.
BiteScis always keeps the teacher front of mind. After all, an amazing resource that a teacher can’t access or use is not of use to anyone! To that end, all our assets are 100% free and use only the simplest materials. We strongly believe that every one of our lessons should be able to be used in any classroom regardless of their resources. Our lessons are also editable, since we know that no matter how great the starting point (and we happen to think ours is pretty great!) teachers will always want to make tweaks and remixes to make the lessons work as well as possible in their classrooms. Despite the bananas topics of some of our lessons (Binary star systems! Knee arthritis! Synthetic organs for transplants!) each one is fully aligned to NGSS and MA-state standards. And finally, since one thing we know all teachers don’t have enough of is time, each of our lessons is designed to be completed in one or two class periods, making them perfect additions to a unit or the odd day before a break or when a substitute is covering.
Our parent organization is ComSciCon and we remain dedicated to helping professional scientists to better communicate their science. We use the development of our lessons as an opportunity to help early career scientists improve their communication skills—is there any bigger challenge than convincing fifteen-year-olds to care about your research?
Wouldn’t it be wonderful if everyone trusted vaccine trial data, understood the predictions of climate scientists, and were confident asking questions of their personal physicians? The effects of centuries of inequities are devastating on our society’s ability to improve our collective scientific literacy. Improving diversity and representation within science is key to ensuring the benefits of preventative medicine, strong public health, and effective communication will be enjoyed more equitably in future generations. While lots of groups try to do one or both of these things, only BiteScis has the goal of making high-quality classroom materials freely available to everyone regardless of geography, background, wealth, or resources.
I truly love all of our lessons. The one I’m most *proud* of might be this reading I put together with a wonderful scientist, Maddie Jannewein, during Covid. We wanted to try and explain how the confusion we were experiencing was (pardon the pun) healthy! We worked with the excellent graphics from Understanding Science to help kids understand that what they were seeing was the messy process of science that is usually hidden away in labs and offices but was suddenly thrust into the news.
Another couple assets I love is the lesson (again with Maddie) on membrane transfer across the placenta—not only because the topic is super cool but also because we worked hard to keep gendered pronouns out of a lesson on pregnancy. Maddie is non-binary and felt strongly that we be sensitive and inclusive to the different ways that people identify. I’m so glad we did it as it made the lesson even more awesome! I also tend to be a little extra proud of lessons that blur the usual boundaries between disciplines, like adding a little bio into physics with our lesson on dolphin swimming or adding a little bio into chemistry with a lesson on corals and ocean temperature.
I’m also fond of a few lessons that put new spins on familiar topics, such as the evolution of anolis lizards, the correlation of malaria and sickle-cell disease, and the one that has the diagram everyone has seen a million times of different tetrapod limbs.
Educators can best use them any way they see fit—they’re the experts. We have concentrations of lessons on a few topics (notably evolution, waves, Newton’s laws, and chemical bonding) that could help form the basis of a unit, but we’re not trying to provide a complete curriculum… not yet, anyway! BiteScis lessons can slip into a unit, act as a summative assessment, or provide something to do on an odd day before a break or when a sub has to cover. The “Bites” (the 1–3 page readings that accompany each lesson) can also provide practice for analyzing “science and technical texts” in an English Language Arts setting.
Our wishlist is long! Big picture, we want to make more lessons to cover more of the standards including lessons that integrate Earth & environmental standards (hello, climate change, we see you) in with biology, chemistry, and physics. We also want to work harder to feature the work of BiteScientists who are first-generation college students, BIPOC, and/or LGBTQ+. We get a lot of requests for middle school lessons, so we’re interested in expanding there, too (we added our first middle school lesson this year). We’d also love to provide versions of our Bites adapted to different reading levels and explore video introductions to our lessons featuring personal stories of our BiteScientists.
I’m such a sucker for puns! I still remember this one from middle school: Did you know AL-G is a FUN guy? The problem, of course, is that that’s wrong, algae are plants, not fungi… so maybe that’s a bad example. Ha!
OK, here are a few:
Discover more learning resources from BiteScis in the LabXchange library:
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