Team:Virginia/Engagement
Public Engagement
Our public engagement on UVA grounds, in an elementary school, and within the iGEM community at large paralleled the innovative nature of synthetic biology by focusing on creativity.
Art Competition
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Wastewater Sticker Project
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Mid-Atlantic iGEM Meetup
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By bringing together engineering principles within a biological context, synthetic biology enables creative innovation. In our efforts to teach students about synthetic biology, we wanted to parallel this integrative foundation.
To do so, we partnered with Ms. Pagni, an art teacher for 5th and 6th graders at Walker Upper Elementary School, and created an art competition for her students. The goal was to bring science and art together. We felt that this was the best way to generate excitement about synthetic biology as a science for her students and to stimulate creative thinking. Recent data has illustrated that creativity, from a neurological perspective, is quite similar in highly talented scientists and artists.1 Instead of arising from “two cultures,” as one might suppose, creative thought in art and in science stimulate similar associated cortices and both shown increased activation of socioaffective processing. We were hopeful that this connection in creativity would manifest through the direct integration of art and science.
While at Walker, we described our project, gave a brief lesson in DNA composition, and then led an edible DNA demonstration for forty of Ms. Pagni’s students. Afterwards, we went on to describe the art competition. The overarching goal was to use art to describe and reflect the ideas of synthetic biology.
We received over forty submissions, of which only five of the students had heard of synthetic biology before our visit, but 38 of them were interested in further exploring synthetic biology. What we were most impressed by, aside from the sheer number of artistically talented students, were the creative ways in which students approached the task. Some focused on mutations, while many used watercolors to depict cells. Using the DNA double helix as a guide, some students focused on the genes themselves. Ultimately, the artwork, some of which is pictured here, reflected an understanding and a unique way of approaching science.
Wastewater Sticker Project
Solving world problems is not always glamorous. When our team decided to further investigate wastewater, we were not sure what kind of smelly situation we had entered. In our visit to the local Rivanna Wastewater Treatment, Wastewater Treatment manager Tim Castillo quickly revealed that the toilet flush is just the beginning. In fact, the process of wastewater treatment is complicated, and we found this system, which would come to inspire our project, quite fascinating.
As we went about beginning to work with paracoccus Denitrificans, a main player in wastewater treatment, we realized that most people, quite like ourselves, knew little about water treatment aside from the pungent aroma. We thought it would be appropriate to pay homage to the many employees who literally do our dirty work by educating the public about wastewater. We researched not only the modern-day processing of wastewater, of which there are several, but also the story of how such a process came to be. Dating back to the Minoan Empire of 3000 BC we tell the story of wastewater treatment through the ages. The link to our site is here.
The next step came in distribution. How were we going to get students, or anyone for that matter, interested in learning about wastewater? It was only too fitting to try to educate others about the business of wastewater treatment while they were doing their business. Creating and placing these attention-grabbing stickers in UVA bathrooms was ideal for generating a captive and curious audience. We hope that this humorous image of Jefferson will encourage readers to our story, thereby informing the public in a creative way.
