Nanoparticles and VR: Not your standard day at school for Kingaroy STEM students
Australian Institute for Bioengineering and Nanotechnology AIBN
Urgent solutions are needed for global problems. At the AIBN we are working on the answers.
You know it’s not class as usual when you’re strapped to a VR headset, exploring nanoparticles and digital organs.
But it hasn’t been a standard day for Kingaroy State High School’s STEM students at all.
A crew of Kingaroy’s brightest young minds are swapping the Sunshine Coast hinterland for Australia’s premier imaging research facility – the AIBN’s UQ Centre for Advanced Imaging – and will spend the next couple of days exploring technology that is driving breakthroughs in personalised medicine.
It’s the seventh year the AIBN has welcomed students from Kingaroy to the building, no doubt a thrill for AIBN deputy director research Professor Kristofer Thurecht – a former Kingaroy highschooler himself.
Accompanied by AIBN researchers, the Kingaroy students are being given a rundown of various aspects of the CAI facility: the high-tech characterisation equipment, the radiochemistry and human scanning instrumentation, while also using virtual reality headsets to explore 3D reconstruction of one of the centre’s recent imaging experiments.
Students will also get to see through a task they started back in the classroom when Thurecht group researchers Irma Vermeijlen , Dr Craig Bell and Cynthia Zhang visited a couple of weeks ago: making their own polymer.
Ultimately, for Kingaroy student Mayella Burton, getting a look inside the AIBN helps cement a natural curiosity that drew her to science in the first place.
“I love science, because you’re learning about how everything works,” Mayella said.
“It also opens you up to a range of different experiences that you wouldn’t normally get to do.”
Thanks for visiting us Kingaroy!