Bay Area Students Unleash Their Inner Radiologists!
With a record crowd of 33,000 people, the Bay Area Science Festival has become the region’s biggest event for science and education. At this year’s event in November of 2015, the Department of Radiology and Biomedical Imaging’s Science Fair Committee created and developed an in-depth, hands-on, and question-based connection by directly interacting with students in attendance.
Our booth consisted of three different activities. First, the kids started their journey with a skeleton beanbag toss. The purpose of this activity was to provide a general and basic concept related to the upper extremity of a skeleton. Our volunteers directed the kids by encouraging them to toss a beanbag into a particular area to demonstrate basic knowledge of the human body.
The next activity introduced a slightly more challenging objective, called “What Doesn’t Belong.” Essentially, the activity required participants to either place different organs onto the correct body part, or they could take off items that would not be inside the human body. This allowed them to think like a radiologist by diagnosing the figurative patient, and also looking for irregular signs, similar to what a radiologist would do in the reading room.
Lastly, the students put together different radiology images that were created into puzzles. Before they could finish the puzzle, we also had them try to guess the image that they were putting together.
We encourage everyone in the department to support our Science Fair, and to find ways of reaching out to the next generation of scientists in our community throughout the year.
I would like to thank the fellows, residents, technologists, and staff who volunteered and dedicated their time to represent our department. Participants: Bernice Lau, MD, Aaron Losey, MD, Ben Laguna, MD, Craig Devincent, Rebecca Galagaran, Dora Tao, Erin Harrison, Aeshah Al-Nagdawi, Maria Pamatmat, Kristine Chooey, Cindy Cheng, Johnson Young, Vanitha Sankaranarayanan, Melanie Regan, Pranathi Sundaram, Cindy Flores, Melinda Parangan-Chu, and Vivek Swarnakar.