This project will implement a comprehensive project for teachers and students designed to integrate bioinformatics and structural biology into existing high school programs so that it becomes a permanent offering of the science curriculum. The BRITE project will engage high school teachers and students in a series of scientific challenges, the answers to which require using the computational tools of molecular biology, structural biology and bioinformatics. Over the 36-month period of the grant, BRITE will train up to 55 teachers in a local project at the Waksman Institute and over 100 teachers in a regional project conducted through distance learning on the Internet. Teachers will field-test challenges with students participating in summer institutes, then introduce the challenges into classroom science teaching. Each year approximately 5,500 students will benefit from their teachers' work in the local and regional projects.
