OSH educational material for scientists

Communities Education
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I am interested in the thread of developing OSH educational material. Perhaps because I’m just becoming a professor I’m thinking more about it, but I think other than in maker-circles, scientists don’t usually have the skills, resource overview or guidance to ask the right people in order to engage in Open Science Hardware.
In particular, besides developing open educational material for professors, I have two formats in mind:

  1. Develop material in the amazing teaching framework of The Carpentries. Besides the Software and Data Carpentries, there should be a sort of Hardware Carpentries (incl. wetware and materials). Has a lot of potential to provide global volunteer-based training programs.
  2. Train-the-trainer programms that are targeted at training volunteer coaches that will go back to their communities to train more people on creating OSH-resources and engaging with them.
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When I first saw the title of the post, I thought it’s educational material aimed at tertiary, secondary, or even primary level students which would be great.

However, something along the lines of the Carpentries sounds like a useful complement to its existing Data and Software curricula.

What educational goals do you have in mind? What would we want a participant to get out of it? Can we transplant material from the STEAM camps?

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Excellent points. I renamed the thread.

I am also just starting to look into this topic more concretely, so It’s really an open question to the community what material has already been developed that can be further tuned, reused, extended.
Just to add on resource to the list: The Wageningen BioHack academy courses: https://waag.org/en/project/biohack-academy-biofactory

I love the carpentry courses with their hand-on approach, open shared material, volunteer training etc. A challenge I see in general with Hardware is that some hands-on teaching would be important but generally involves more things (e.g. design softwares and programming languages/interfaces), takes more time, and often costs money. So the challenge would be to do this (potentially even remotely) and cheaply. The amount of things to be covered could be dispersed into different teaching units like in the carpentries. Perhaps even building on each other, e.g. basic and advanced units.

To get started developing and testing some open edu materials for scientists, @Fernan and I are currently exploring the joint development of a prototyping course for bioengineers at the Universidad Católica de Chile, teaching only open approaches. Topics might include the following:

Draft outline V0:

  1. Modern prototyping is open, digital rapid prototyping
  2. Digital fabrication
    1. 3D printing FDM and resources
    2. 3D printing SLA, printing services and access to tools in Santiago
    3. 3D bioprinting principles and applications
    4. Laser Cutting and CNC milling
  3. CAD design
    1. Introduction, design principles, OnShape (not OS but collaboration friendly)
    2. Hands-on OnShape challenge (Cups)
    3. OpenSCAD
  4. Electronic tools for open prototyping
    1. Arduino and microcontrollers
    2. Raspberry Pi and webservers
    3. (?) Open Programming languages and tools: Python, Jupiter Notebook, Django, R - markup
  5. Biomaterials
    1. Practical I (fungal furniture? Bricks from sand and bacteria? Fermentation?)
    2. Practical part II
  6. DNA assembly and genetic prototyping
    1. Cell free prototyping
    2. Practical enzyme production I
    3. (Practical enzyme production II)
  7. Bioproduction and cell modification
    1. Cell modification overview only
    2. Lean approaches and challenges to scale up from prototyping
  8. Liquid handling
    1. Microfluidics intro
    2. Microfluidics practical
    3. Other tools and robots
  9. Optics integration
    1. Open tools intro
  10. Documentation and community engagement
    1. Documentation
    2. Communities, social media and giving back I
    3. Giving back II
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@MakerTobey I am really interested by this thread. Because we are working to build curricula for the Africa Institute of Open Science.

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And I think, courses organized by Trend Africa and the program Fernand used to organise in Africa can also be inspiring.

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That’s great!
Two point I want to highlight.

  1. People usually forget the pedagogical part needed on any Open Educational Resource. For example, this article talks about it: Five Critiques of the Open Educational Resources Movement. I suggest you read it, it’s good.
  2. I have a prejudice about STEAM education, as a whole, because it lacks reflection about science and technologies, and it can reproduce some myths about how the process of production of science and tech happens. Also, reproduces a discourse of science and tech as neutral and as it could save the world. But, they’re good label for financing. So, it can be good, just take care for not reproducing some old myths. The research on education that approach this is called Science, Technology and Society, but if you want to go deep on it I suggest you look for some guidance because this area can be a mess and has many lines of research. Unfortunately, I have no material in English to suggest, something in Spanish, but mostly in Portuguese.
  3. Something it’s coming out of my research is that teaching with open source tools usually don’t put the philosophy/ideology of open source on highlight, so the formation gets more about the technical part and not about the importance of openness and etc, so the students may still think with the proprietary/conventional ideology. What the guys from Open Hardware Makers are doing are the opposite. I suggest you to take a look on it to be inspired.

:volcano: :grinning: :bike:

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