While some teens are spending their quarantine on Instagram or TikTok, these teenagers are using their time to make biology education more accessible worldwide. Jaeah and Jaejeong Kim are seniors at Hunter College High School in New York City. The 17-year old twin brother and sister are co-founders of OhWorm!, an organization that produces biology education content for over 500 schools worldwide.
When the pandemic struck, Jae and Jaeah soon realized that resources for remote biology dissection labs were woefully inadequate. Videos of dissection labs were extremely limited and outdated, and the education of students in remote learning was suffering from it. Even more, they spoke to many students whose schools couldn’t afford the resources to conduct dissection labs even in a normal year.
Soon, they decided to film the videos themselves. Jaeah and Jae co-founded OhWorm!, an organization that aims to make biology education more accessible to those who need it. OhWorm! produces educational videos on YouTube to teach students animal and human anatomy through dissections. The videos are also paired with a parallel online publication with a variety of educational articles that supplement and further the information in the videos. To date, OhWorm! has currently produced over a hundred videos and articles.
As Jaeah says, “Our mission is to make interactive biology education available to anyone who may not have enough resources to explore it themselves. We want to give people who might not be able to do dissections or labs on their own the opportunity to still be inspired and learn from these resources.”
Their efforts have had a large impact; over 500 schools in 42 countries, including 170 colleges, are currently using OhWorm! videos and articles in their classrooms. But Jae and Jaeah want to reach out even more; they created OhWorm! to make sure that no student is deprived of the chance to learn.
In the future, Jae and Jaeah aim to raise funds to provide affordable dissection kits for students and schools. Above all, they hope that the resources they are making will continue to assist schools and students through further months of remote learning, and, more importantly, inspire curiosity and passion in the people who watch it.
Visit their website, https://www.oh-worm.com/, for a full catalog of videos and articles. Also visit their YouTube page, where videos are posted: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCYb5RqkYUc0sfdJff9DyMqA?pbjreload=102
