Team:Cornell/Engagement
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Starting a Dialogue
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.
Public Perceptions
Career Exploration Conference
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. 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.
