Team:Georgia State/HP/Gold Integrated
Integrated Human Practices
Gold Medal and Integrated Human Practices
After being invited by the Collegiate Neuroscience Society & the Georgia Center for Deaf and Hard of Hearing to participate in a STEM Camp for Deaf students, we were able to connect with high school students to educate them on synthetic biology techniques with the assistance of a Deaf PhD student during a lab tour. In preparation for their visit, we met with an ASL professor to develop the lesson plan for the lab visit that includes many visual aids and terminology to best provide the interpreters with the resources that they need to best communicate the activities to the students. After the successful camp, we were able to get a better understanding of how students with a hearing impairment develop new sign language and communicate amongst each other. We then began to explore the options of ways to make our lab more accessible to other students. The first step was to began to look up online stem databases to try to recreate signs for our ASL archive. We then started to record our videos on our own and checked with a Deaf student and realized that some of the words that we were signing were wrong. At that point, we decided to connect with an ASL instructor on campus and ASL student group to teach us signs for biology and to create new synthetic biology terms for the American Sign Language. When we went to one of their meetings, they initially started to communicate with us while signing and talking at the same time to introduce us to the language. We found some difficulties of creating new signs when we were working with a deaf student because we had to explain to the student who was teaching. We learned that to create a new sign, the person who creates the sign would need to have a clear understanding of what the words are and how to they are described to make a clear visual sign to communicate with the hearing-impaired. We also learned that American Sign Language is regional and that it is inappropriate for nondeaf people to create signs for people who are deaf. We then created a survey to find out how many students in the iGEM community were disabled. We saw a flaw in the questions that we asked, in that the students who responded didn’t have a disability. This could mean that this an opportunity for other iGEM teams to find innovative ways to connect with other stem students who have learning disabilities.
