Public release date: 26-Jul-2012 [ | E-mail | Share ]

Contact: Natasha Pinol npinol@aaas.org 202-326-6440 American Association for the Advancement of Science

When Brian White was a child, his kindergarten teacher wrote in his student record that he would only talk to the other children if the topic was science. Throughout his childhood, White's fascination with science led him to take batteries apart, blow things up, and to build radios and computer components.

Now an associate professor in the biology department at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, White is the winner of the Science Prize for Inquiry-Based Instruction (IBI). He won the award for his creation of Aipotu, a computer-simulated world in which students apply the tools of genetics, biochemistry, molecular biology and evolution to develop an understanding of the formation of color in a flower.

"What I'm trying to do is give people the tools to play around," says White, who explains that Aipotu is "utopia" backward. "What I've always liked about science is what you could do with what you learned."

Science's IBI Prize was developed to showcase outstanding materials, usable in a wide range of schools and settings, for teaching introductory science courses at the college level. The materials must be designed to encourage students' natural curiosity about how the world works, rather than to deliver facts and principles about what scientists have already discovered. Organized as one free-standing "module," the materials should offer real understanding of the nature of science, as well as providing an experience in generating and evaluating scientific evidence. Each month, Science publishes an essay by a recipient of the award, which explains the winning project. The essay about Aipotu will be published on July 27.

"We're trying to advance science education," says Bruce Alberts, editor-in-chief of Science. "This competition provides much-needed recognition to innovators in the field whose efforts promise significant benefits for students and for science literacy in general. The publication in Science of an article on each laboratory module will help guide educators around the globe to valuable free resources that might otherwise be missed."

After many hours of experiments in his parents' basement, White went on to MIT for his undergraduate work. Many of his classes were lectures, but by his junior year, he was able to take a class that had him in the lab all afternoon every day.

"I cooked up many harebrained experiments," White says. "In the lab, you learn problem-solving. Most of the time, what you attempt doesn't work, so you have to figure out why."

Throughout his education, White had some wonderful teaching experiences, he says, including at a science camp in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, where one of his students built a pinball machine that kept score. White said demonstrating the machine to the student's parents was an amazing moment, one of many that White had early on that drew him into education.

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Science magazine prize goes to virtual world where undergrads explore DNA