Revitalizing a Transplantation Science Curriculum through Creative Technology Methods

Abstract

Donor Alliance of Colorado and Wyoming revitalized their transplantation science curriculum by infusing creative technology into lesson planning and methodologies. The overarching goal of this revitalization was to deliver accurate content to students, their families, and the education community about how transplants work and who this life-saving science impacts. This article recounts the work of the curriculum team to align design and computational thinking frameworks with discovering the present affordances of their middle and high school stakeholders and ultimately bridge available resources into an engaging and interactive curriculum. The curriculum team constructed this bridge from educators’ affordances to their effectivities to provide them with virtual avatars, surveys to reveal current knowledge, audio and video content to invite questions, and interactive augmented reality applications to delve deeply into the study of the human body. The transplantation science curriculum connects stakeholders with accurate information to change the trajectory of transplantation science from misconceptions to registration as an organ, eye, and tissue donor. This article is a vital step to fill a gap in the literature about using creative technology methods to enact critical pedagogy as transformative teaching and learning that embraces the imperative that we, in education, mirror society.