Getting up close and personal with bacteria, fetal pigs and nature are just some of the things participants in University of Texas Permian Basin’s biology camp got to experience this week on campus.
Camp coordinator and biology lecturer Paula Gutierrez said there were 13 participants from 13 to 18 years old.
Laith Hilal, 13, is going into eighth grade at Nimitz Middle School and Miali Sanchez, 12, is going into eighth grade at STEM Academy. Both wanted to try something different for summer camp this year. On June 26, they were dissecting fetal pigs, something only college students usually get a chance to do.
“It’s pretty cool. I mean, anything that involves … altering bacterial genes, dissecting pigs, and extracting DNA from bananas for some reason, it’s pretty cool,” Hilal said.
Sanchez said she’d never really done anything with biology before.
“I just wanted to try something new because I’ve never really done anything like dissecting, or really like doing much with bacteria, really much of anything about biology,” she added.
Sanchez said it’s been really fun.
“Even now, which I’m kind of squirming about a little,” she said.
Last year, Gutierrez, who was leading a section on anatomy June 26, said the kids chose to dissect a starfish, clam and an earthworm.
“But this year, we thought let’s really focus on the pig and that way we can focus on going through all the body organs with them,” she said.
They are trying to make the camp more comprehensive this year.
“We’re trying to make sure that we keep it a really wide breadth of information,” Gutierrez said.
She said June 26 that the camp had gone well so far.
“We tried to keep all our topics very, very broad so that we can expose them to more things, so we’re trying to each day focus on one particular area of biology. Today would be anatomy. Yesterday was microbiology. They bioengineered bacteria to make it glow in the dark. The day before, that’s genetics and so we extracted DNA from some bananas. Then tomorrow (June 27) will be field ecology. We’ll go outside, we’ll take a little field trip to a pasture and we’ll collect some measurements from out there,” Gutierrez said.
She added that the camp gives the kids a head start on things they’ll be learning later on in their educational careers.
“These kids are doing some things that, like the pig, for example, college students dissect the pig. But the owl pellets, we don’t do that here at UTPB. That’s something that our college students are really excited about. They want to try it out,” Gutierrez said.
With the pigs, she said, you can see the organs very well. The kids had work sheets to see how many organs they could identify.
Jennifer Nutting is a UTPB student working with the biology camp.
“I wish my kids were old enough to be here. It teaches them a lot about science … I like it,” Nutting said.
