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<h6>Image 1: Zoë C and John giving a presentation at the Northwest Science school at Corpus Christi college</h6> | <h6>Image 1: Zoë C and John giving a presentation at the Northwest Science school at Corpus Christi college</h6> | ||
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<h6>Image 2: Chun, Jei, Alissa, Helen and Sumera at the UNIQ summer school</h6> | <h6>Image 2: Chun, Jei, Alissa, Helen and Sumera at the UNIQ summer school</h6> | ||
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Revision as of 09:37, 29 October 2017
Education and Public Engagement
Introduction
Designing educational activities around synthetic biology is difficult because the field is new and interdisciplinary (Kuldell, 2007). Consequently there are a lack of standard principles and definitions, creating an enlarging division of knowledge between the general public and synthetic biology community which fosters generalisation and misconceptions. Bidirectional public engagement is necessary to help bridge this gap, and was therefore a key focus of our public engagement.
Young People Engagement - summer schools
A major reason for the gap is a lack of synthetic biology training of the young. To accurately tackle this problem we base our activities on learning objectives for MIT undergraduates training in synthetic biology (Kuldell, 2007) (Figure 1). Our approach means our educational activities are not generalised, true to core synthetic biology concepts, and encourage scientific thinking. Although there are a few excellent secondary education tools available (e.g. biobuilder) many of these require extensive access to lab equipment and expensive resources, creating a barrier to use in teaching. Therefore our designed activities emphasis low cost, minimal materials and do not assume teaching lab access.
Figure 1: Main outcomes of synthetic biology education and activities we designed to fulfil these
Activities
To meet these outcomes we designed a variety of activities including: a genetic memory computer lab, bacterial photography system, ethical washing line, and biosensor design. These activities have been formatted into lesson plans and printable resources, made publically available for use by by future iGEM teams.
Our workshops were used at 3 different oxford summer schools: northwest science ( students 17-18yrs interested a broad range of sciences), Oriel college summer school (students 13-14 yrs interested in medicine) and UNIQ (academically selected students 17-18 yrs from state schools and disadvantaged backgrounds interested in biochemistry).
Image 1: Zoë C and John giving a presentation at the Northwest Science school at Corpus Christi college
Image 2: Chun, Jei, Alissa, Helen and Sumera at the UNIQ summer school
Improving through Feedback
Student feedback allowed us to refine our activities after each school (Table 1). For example, we converted the tinker cell computer based bacterial photography system activity into a paper based game so computers access was no longer needed, and developed a formalised ethical washing line workshop after finding students disengaged by an unstructured ethical discussion. In addition to workshops, Zoe F gave a university style lecture about synthetic biology and our project to students at the northwest science school.
School | Positives | Problems | Modifications |
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Northwest School |
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Oriel |
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UNIQ |
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Curiosity Carnival
The team had an activity stand at the curiosity carnival, an Oxford wide festival for researchers to share their research in innovative ways. Our stand was in the centre of the city and attracted a diverse audience of more than 4500 members of the public, from young children to other researchers.
Image 3: Kushal, Angela, Sumera and Zoe C at the curiosity carnival
Our stand involved:
- Poster display outlining facts about Chagas disease and our diagnostic solution
- ‘Find-cruzi’ game to highlight the difficulty of identifying the parasite by microscopy of a blood smear
- ‘E. coli pong’ game to explain transformation
- Competition to design a biosensor from magnets on a white board
- Voting on ethical scenarios
- Duplo building to highlight the principle of DNA parts as biobricks that can be combined to create sequences of a designed function
Image 4: Sumera demonstrating our ‘E. coli - pong’ activity
IGEM UK Meet-ups
Engaging with other teams to share ideas and techniques is a vital component of iGEM: we were grateful to be able to attend the UK meet up jointly organised by the University of Westminster, UCL, and Warwick during which we gave jamboree style poster and powerpoint presentation to other teams, providing invaluable preparation for Boston. The event was lots of fun and we appreciated the opportunity to meet, network and form collaborations with other UK teams.