Difference between revisions of "Team:Cornell/Engagement"
| Line 94: | Line 94: | ||
<li><a href="#">OUTREACH</a> | <li><a href="#">OUTREACH</a> | ||
<ul> | <ul> | ||
| − | <li><a href="https://2017.igem.org/Team:Cornell/ | + | <li><a href="https://2017.igem.org/Team:Cornell/Collaborations">COLLABORATIONS</a></li> |
<li><a href="https://2017.igem.org/Team:Cornell/Engagement">PUBLIC ENGAGEMENT</a></li> | <li><a href="https://2017.igem.org/Team:Cornell/Engagement">PUBLIC ENGAGEMENT</a></li> | ||
</ul> | </ul> | ||
Revision as of 02:04, 27 October 2017
<!DOCTYPE html>
Learning So We Can Help Others Learn
We believe that the most effective scientific communication would come with some deliberate thought about what the best way to transfer knowledge and start a conversation really would be. That is why, before starting most of our community engagement work, we dedicated time to going to workshops and reflecting on our past work to improve our own skillset. 4H and Center for Teaching Excellence Facilitation Training 4H Cooperative Extension is a network of over 100 public universities that provide youth activities in experiences. Annually the organization organized a career explorations conference for high school and middle school students to introduce them to the wide variety of different STEM fields. Cornell iGEM hosted a class in this program about the intersection of science and business, and is described further below. However, through our participation we were able to actively improve and deeply consider the styles, methods, and techniques we employ with science communication. This is so important especially when talking about something like synthetic biology which has known as a point of controversy in the large public. In preparation for this event, 4H partnered with the Cornell Center for Teaching Excellence to provide effective training on how to convey and teach topics interactively and with a high level of engagement. Our proposed lesson plans were workshopped and we learned how to develop programs that would not only be exciting and capture the attention of our participants, but also lead to measurable learning outcomes. Inspired by the workshop we decided that we should apply Bloom’s Taxonomy into the work that we did with students. Bloom’s Taxonomy has a series of levels, seen in the diagram below.
As a teacher, we aimed for our participants to start at the bottom of the pyramid and work their way up. Based on the focus of every level, we developed learning objectives detailing what we would want the participants to learn and be able to do as a result. Through this we ensured the results of our programs would be measurable and significant. Reflecting on Past Work Outreach has been a major activity of our team for the last several seasons. We always try to provide the best workshops and lessons to students who attend our programs. We thoroughly evaluated our past programs to see what we needed to improve upon for new work that we did. Not only did we reflect on how the programs ourselves, but we read over all of the feedback forms that we had participants fill out at the end of every program. The major points we decided to focus on were: Creating more hands-on demonstrations and activities to teach Having presentations broken up with more activities and/or discussion Gauging audiences’ background before the start of the workshop to know whether to emphasize foundational biology concepts or more advanced material Providing chances within programs for participants to demonstrate and practice what they had learned Throughout the rest of our outreach we critically reflecting on the reactions of participants, participants’ engagement level, and participants’ grasp of new concepts. We continued to collect feedback forms. Creating the best programs requires development, and we decided to strive for continuous improvement.
Public Perceptions
Career Exploration Conference
Every year, 4-H, a global network of organizations dedicated to youth development, sponsors a Career Explorations Conference at Cornell. The conference exposes youth to various academic fields and careers, develops their leadership skills, and gives them experience in a university setting. The theme this year was entrepreneurship. As forefronts of entrepreneurship in a synthetic biology landscape, we created a workshop bridging the gap between synthetic biology and business. Our students were 6th to 8th graders without biology experience. We taught them the basics of DNA, and delved further into plasmids and the extraction of DNA from wheat germ with a hand-on demonstration. After our lesson, we gave the students a chance to brainstorm ideas for their own plasmid - much like an entrepreneur. We asked them “what do you want your bacteria to do?” Here’s what they dreamt up.
Splash! at Cornell
Splash! at Cornell is an educational program hosted at Cornell annually, where students can come to “teach anything, learn anything.” Cornell students teach short classes on a topic of their choosing, from immunology to salsa dance. Naturally, it made sense for Cornell iGEM to teach what we are passionate about – synthetic biology! We developed a curriculum that highlighted interesting aspects of synthetic biology. We taught our students about research techniques and dove into an application by presenting our 2016 project, Legendairy. We concluded with a hands on activity - loading a gel, and a discussion of bioethical issues facing synbio using case studies. Looks like our class made a splash!
Partnering with the Next Generation
The Great NY State Fair
An American tradition of over 175 years. An annual attendance of over a million visitors. All these factors made the Great New York State Fair, a thirteen day celebration of New York agriculture, entertainment, and technology, the perfect place for Cornell iGEM to reach out to a large and receptive audience. Our aim was to bolster the fun and festivity by exhibiting our hydroponics synthetic biology application, and discussing the myriad of opinions surrounding genetic engineering. Situated at the New York 4H building, we joined a wide range of education and technology exhibits targeting youth of all ages as well as parents. In our time there, we would enthusiastically break the ice by asking fairgoers a simple question, “What does synthetic biology mean to you?” We encountered many families who had no idea what that meant. But by discussing and engaging their curiosity with activities from Building with Biology that illustrated synthetic biology as a way to put different pieces together to solve a problem, we were able to describe the essence of synthetic biology. Afterwards we asked them to participate in our photo campaign, called Humans of SynBio. It was not always consensus. During some of our conversations, we had fairgoers who shared that genetic engineering were dangerous for human health. Rather than immediately refute them, we listened and facilitated dialogue to resolve misconceptions and hear these various viewpoints. See “Actively Discussing the Issues” below for further discussion.
Humans of Synbio
What does synthetic biology mean to you?
Collaborations
In collaboration with Stony Brook iGEM, we conducted a survey to assess people’s thoughts on synthetic biology in New York state. One of our goals was to see if there were differing perceptions of synthetic biology in two different regions of New York, between Long Island and the Finger lakes. See the Collaborations page for more information about the outreach we did.
Lab Tours and Symposiums
RAWExpo RAWExpo is an annual event at Cornell meant to showcase the work of creators in all disciplines. iGEM attended and shared our work engineering life through synthetic biology. At our display we showcased last year’s project and discussed our ideas for this year’s project. The dialogue among other groups of creators in the Cornell community, ranging from engineers building planes to design students creating fashion lines to architecture students designing structures, was beneficial for our team, and helped us more thoroughly consider the users of our project and the aesthetics of the final deliverables of our work. Makerfaire Makerfaire is a symposium in which different groups display the innovative ideas and creations they have come up with, often applying the principles of engineering. Among airplanes, cars, and model architectural structures, we showed others how to create with biological tools. We talked to visitors about the possibilities that synthetic biology could bring to reality. We discussed the types of techniques that could be used, such as cloning and CRISPR-Cas9, and also explained our past and present projects as tangible examples of what synthetic biology could accomplish. The Makerfaire was a wonderful place to showcase pushing boundaries of synthetic biology and the increasing role synthetic biology will play in society, both which iGEM encompasses. Society for Women Engineers Lab Tour Despite huge progress over the past decades, women still struggle to advance in several fields of engineering. The Cornell Society of Women Engineers organized a way for high school women to connect with Cornell engineering students. As a team with driven women pursuing STEM careers, we participated in the event. Our involvement was two-fold. First, we attended a tabling event where girls could chat with us about our experiences in biological, chemical, and computer engineering - all of which are components of the work that we completed through our iGEM projects. We also spoke to them about our past projects. Secondly, we hosted a lab tour for students who showed specific interest in biological or biomedical engineering. During this portion, we went into detail about our project timeline, the biological principles behind this year’s project OxyPonics, the uses of all of the laboratory equipment, and what made us want to enter engineering. Our team also has the unique culture of being very student driven, which has let us explore what interests us most in the problems we tackle and engineering solutions we develop. The young women who visited us said they felt inspired to pursue biological engineering. They were determined to break boundaries in the different fields of engineering. Prefreshman Summer Program Every year, the Cornell Office of Undergraduate Biology hosts a science outreach program for the incoming freshmen on campus who are part of the Prefreshman Summer Program (PSP). A variety of engineering project teams, such as iGEM, and undergraduate scientists give lab tours and participate in a panel discussion where the incoming freshmen can learn what it is like to work in a lab and how to get involved in science on campus. We showed freshmen around our lab, including specific equipment and their purposes, talked them through what iGEM is and what our past and present projects are, and answered any questions they had about how to get involved in science at Cornell. Many of the pre-freshmen showed great interest in joining a project team or doing research on campus. Summer Institute for Life Sciences - hosted by Cornell Office of Undergraduate Biology Every summer the Office of Undergraduate Biology at Cornell University runs summer events as part of a program called the Summer Institute of Life Sciences. At the end of the summer, there is a culmination symposium. This year our team chose to give a 10-minute presentation at the seventh annual SILS symposium. This opportunity to share our work on OxyPonics with the Cornell community and visiting summer student researchers also gave us a chance to get valuable feedback from professors during the question and answer session. We also were able to learn about some really cool research other students were working on! ENGRG 1050 ENGRG 1050 is a course that all freshman engineers at Cornell are required to take. It is an opportunity to get adjusted to campus, to meet fellow students who are in similar majors, to ask upperclassmen questions, and to learn about applications to project teams such as iGEM. We presented about what we do, on how to join iGEM on campus, and answered questions from the freshmen.
