The Students Discover project is all about getting kids involved in real science.  Either the collection or analysis of data or both are what students will be doing for the project.  There are of course challenges to overcome when thinking of getting students involved and even bigger challenges trying to spread the lessons to other areas of the country or world.  I hope that we have been able to think of most of the issues and find ways to address them.  But I know that in the coming years the next set of fellows will be able to build upon our work and make the lessons stronger and better.

Mite DNA is the key piece to the mite project.  Obtaining it cleanly from people and sending it to a lab to be extracted and sequenced are the first and biggest steps of the project.  These are also probably the most difficult steps.  The average middle school science classroom does not have have the materials for obtaining DNA, extracting such a small amount of DNA, and sequencing it.  Access to a lab that can and will do these steps will be critical for this project to grow.  Willis, Kayla and I have access to Dan and the Rob Dunn labs at NCSU to complete those tasks and share the data with us.   These labs do not have the capacity or the funds to do this for every school that wants to participate, so one condition for success is finding other labs that will complete this piece for other schools.

Along the same lines, teachers need to purchase the materials to sample the mite DNA from students. The materials are not expensive but they are an added cost to the teacher or school.  And any lab that completes the process will also have added expenses for helping with the project.  Unlike the other Students Discover projects there are a lot of added costs with the mite project that may make it more difficult to scale.

Another key component is the data analysis.  The labs are going to return to us a set of DNA sequences for our students to take a look at.  Dan has taught us how to use free software to take the sequences and turn them into a phylogeny that will make the data more useful and meaningful.  The issue here is that this is a program that teachers will have to take the time to download, and learn how to use.  We are creating a guide to help teachers learn the program, but this is still something they will need to work with the program in order to walk students through using it.