Team:RHIT/HP/Silver
Human Practices:
We were fortunate to speak with Jaimee Goodman, Director of Maternal Child Services, of the Terre Haute Union Hospital. She was the professional voice we needed to answer many of our questions regarding the safety and development of our idea. As a medical professional, Jaimee Goodman was a stakeholder in our project and therefore it was important to meet with her to help get a better understanding of our design constraints. She informed us that she believes our project is a solid step towards better care for women in developing countries. She was enthusiastic about our project’s potential to not only be used for prenatal care, but also for personal check-up systems for those affected with anemia and diabetes.
Outreach with Public Education:
The RHIT iGEM team believes that community involvement and public education of youth is important, which spurred the creation of educational material, presentations, and workshops for the local community. The team wanted to make the activities not only educational for a large age range, but fun and interactive as well. The presentations included general information on biology and synthetic biology along with fun facts and trivia to keep the kids engaged. The team helped kids extract DNA from strawberries and played a game with them that we developed called “Be that Bio brick!”
Be that Bio Brick: after being taught the basic parts of a bio brick system, kids had the opportunity to come to the front of room and be a part to make a system. Shown below are the basic paper cutouts used so that the game can be replicated.
Locations:
Lincoln Trail College 7/13/2017 - The team gave a presentation to 3-6th graders at the “College for Kids” camp offered at Lincoln Trail College.
Terre Haute Children’s Museum 7/26/2017 - The team gave the presentation to the museum’s “Macro Micro” day camp with Kindergarden-4th graders and the general public. Both adults and children had great questions in the Q&A section which showed that the team was able to reach the entirety of our intended audience.
Recognition:
We were lucky enough to have Terre Haute’s local WHITV Channel 10 do a news report on our presentation to The Terre Haute Children’s Museum as well as a story on the general scope of our project (1).
Lincoln Trail College featured us on their YouTube channel recognizing us for our presentation. (2)
The Tribune Star also printed a story written by a member of Rose-Hulman’s Communications and Marketing Department regarding our project and what we were hoping to accomplish.
At Lincoln Trail College’s “College for Kids” camp, Julia Walsh and Madison Muncie presented on synthetic biology basics and helped kids at extract DNA out of strawberries.
Audrey gives an interactive presentation and invites kids up to the stage to play “ Be that Bio Brick!” at the Terre Haute Children’s Museum
Moving Forward
We are grateful to have interacted with such a wide range of ages because it gave us insight as to how to best convey our message: With STEM you can change the world! We have been collaborating with teachers from the Terre Haute school District to find out what kind of lesson plans they think would be most beneficial to their students so that the information spreads synthetic biology education and awareness while staying appropriate for their learning level. One thing that we did learn is that providing real world examples is a beneficial and applicable learning tool for all age ranges. These lesson plans will be available for teachers across the country to download and use for free.
