Northern Manitoba

“The Northern Manitoba SABC program is in its third year as a pilot to determine how schools, teachers and students living away from large urban centres, where possible mentors for SABC are more common, can benefit from one of Canada’s most prestigious science programs for high school students. With Swan Valley Regional Secondary School student, Kirsten Larson, receiving the 2009 national prize for the project with the most promising commercial application, it is clear that students in the north can overcome the problems of time and space to participate and succeed in this program.

The NSABC program is still being built. MIndSet, as the host of the NSABC, hopes to increase the number of schools, teachers, students, communities and mentors participating from the North. To that end a Northern advisory committee has been recruited from interested organizations in the North including MAFRI and University College of the North. A training session for mentors has also increased the number of projects that one day might come out of Northern Manitoba.

In addition, there have been other signs that biotechnology and life science can attract more youth. Several students from northern centres attended the Youth Biomedical Laboratory Camp at the Inner City Science Laboratory during the past summer. Students, teachers and administrators involved in NSABC from Swan Valley Regional Secondary School in Swan River and Hapnot Collegiate in Flin Flon participated in a field trip to the Worthington, Minnesota veterinary medicine bioscience cluster. The purpose of these events have been to increase students’ knowledge and attraction to biotechnology. The Worthington experience, especially, was an outstanding learning experience as students had many hands on laboratory experiences.

Other schools contacted and interested in participating in the NSABC include Frontier Collegiate, Cranberry Portage, Joe A. Ross School in the OCN First Nations and Margaret Barbour Collegiate Institute in The Pas. Students from all these schools will be invited to the Student Biotechnology Conference being held in February.

Activities to provide educators with more background in biotechnology have also been undertaken including a hands on lab on the Chemistry of Food, followed by a screening of a segment of Kitchen Crimes as a vehicle for putting infectious disease into the context of student’s daily lives. At the same time, some of the teachers at SVRSS are moving from being consumers of biotechnology knowledge to being “creators” of innovation with a partnership project with Microsoft Canada to look at the use of Microsoft’s OneNote as an organizational framework to organize biotech research from a number of text, audio, video and internet resources.

This year’s competition and awards event will be held April 8-9 in The Pas, Manitoba. For more information, please contact Norman Lee, nlee35@shaw.ca, or 204-269-3383.