Randomized trial examines biodesign education effectiveness using translational teaching tools, suggesting enhanced learning for mixed-background students.
Biodesign is an emerging transdisciplinary field that engages non-biologists in working with living systems. This poses a range of challenges for biodesign education, as traditional teaching methods between life sciences and other disciplines remain poorly aligned. Particularly, education models for training mixed-background student cohorts remain underdeveloped. Drawing on an experimental design research workshop with an interdisciplinary group of students, four barriers to entry were identified: biological uncertainty, knowledge asymmetry, delegation dynamics, and temporal mismatch. This paper reports on classroom observations and proposes the introduction of a translational teaching tool as a method for lowering the entry threshold to biodesign through scaffolded practical training. The tool aims to reinterpret scientific Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) as Biodesign Manuals (BM) - assembly-manual-style, visual instructional devices that translate tacit laboratory knowledge into transdisciplinary workflows.
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Mastalerska-Scholz et al. (2026) studied this question.
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