Tattoo a Fruit Workshop
Hand someone a tattoo machine and a banana, and the lecture becomes unnecessary.
Citrus peel takes a needle in almost the same way skin does. That accident of anatomy is the whole workshop: give a person two minutes of instruction, a real tattoo machine and a grapefruit, and they learn more about depositing pigment under a living surface than an hour of slides could teach them. Nobody has to be told it is engineering. They work it out while holding the needle.
What happens next is always the same and never gets old. The questions arrive unprompted, because a person mid-tattoo has to solve a real problem: how deep, how fast, what happens when the fruit fights back. Art, chemistry and biomedical engineering stop being separate subjects for as long as the machine is running. Then they take the fruit home.
It started in 2019 as a teen science café at a public library, ten students and a talk about color-changing tattoos. Since then it has run as an open pop-up ambushing passers-by in the engineering center, and four times through CU Science Discovery’s Biotechnology Bootcamp. Fourteen offerings, more than two hundred people, middle school through undergraduate.
The pop-up was formally assessed with the CU Center for STEM Learning. Thirty participants, seventeen minutes each on average, and of twenty-two who filled out the survey, twenty-one reported feeling significantly better afterward and twenty said it had improved their day. Good numbers. But the one that decided I would keep doing this came from a survey form at that first library café, and it was a sample size of one.
Carson J. Bruns, Associate Professor, ATLAS Institute and the Paul M. Rady Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Colorado Boulder.