(AP) — High schools across the Kansas City region are working to get students excited about science and engineering.

Steve Case, the director of the Center of Science Education at the University of Kansas, says the effort is important because science education needs students to tap their creative energy. He says schools need to immerse students in projects that involve interesting work and teach flexible and adaptive thinking.

The goal was the reason why about 50 high schools students from around Kansas City recently attended a lecture by J. Craig Venter about the future possibilities of fusing biology and engineering. Venter led the first team to sequence the human genome, and he also helped create the first cell with a synthetic genome.