About My Fellowship

Dr. Jesse Jur and myself

My name is Bob Bourgeois and I am a Kenan Fellow!  You might be wondering why a Career and Technical Education (CTE) teacher who focuses on a curriculum in Game Art & Design at Durham School of the Arts (DSA) would be interested in a STEM program focused on science?  Well, let me explain.

I just completed my 12th year as a teacher, all at DSA.  Over the years, I have taught students in grades 6-12, but currently all of my classes are for high school students.  I started out by teaching business education.  You know…how to keyboard, basics of MS Office, etc.  Useful…yes.  Exciting…not even close!  As as avid gamer, when the opportunity to teach game design presented itself, I was right on top of it saying ‘YES, please!’  It was only then that I learned that North Carolina requires students taking Game Art & Design to take a class known as Scientific Visualization as a prerequisite.  This class is designed to teach students how to use the visualization tools and techniques that are common in both game design careers along with a wide array of other occupations, though mainly focusing on scientific endeavors.  This, specifically, is what brought me to the Kenan Fellows Program, along with the Wearable Devices: Nanotechnology for Your Health Project.  When you include my constant desire to grow and challenge myself through new experiences to the usefulness of curriculum related materials I plan to design in the coming months, this program was a perfect fit for me!

Over the course of my internship, my goal is to become more familiar with a wide variety of visualization tools and techniques which I lack personal experience outside of what I have read about them.  In Sci Vis, we explore different areas of science and each area’s related equipment including tools such as: X-ray crystallography, microscopy (both light and electron), DNA fingerprinting, and various medical imaging techniques, to name a few.  The Wearable Devices project crosses through most, if not all of these areas.  This will give me a deeper understanding of them so I can help my students better understand such techniques.  In fact, as you might have already seen on my main blog page, we have already toured facilities at NC State University where they house many of these devices and much more!  Add to this the many ways one can create an assortment of visualizations to make it easier to understand what data is trying to show a reader and I will have a much deeper understanding of my curriculum which can translate to better instruction of my students!

Starting the day off right…with Ping Pong!

Besides a better understanding of these techniques, I hope to take away some much needed, up-to-date lesson plans and activities that I can design around the use of sensor devices such as the Arduino Lilypad and Texas Instruments Sensor Tag, to name only two of the sensors I will be working with during my internship at the ASSIST Center. Hopefully, these will be items that other Sci Vis teachers across the state will also find useful in teaching the curriculum.  And, who knows, perhaps I can even find some cross-over information that will be useful in at least one of the Game Design classes I teach as well.

Any way you look at this experience, it will have a positive effect on my ability to teach students while allowing me to grow both personally and professionally.  It has already reinvigorated my interest in teaching, provided me with a number of teaching techniques/resources, and allowed me to connect with other passionate educators!  Even if I walked away with nothing else, those three takeaways alone will have a great impact on both myself and my students alike!

Kenan Fellow Cohorts in the Wearable Devices Project