Team:Baltimore BioCrew/Education
Education
Overview
Members of the human practices team collaborated to form ideas for a series of social media posts with topics centered around synthetic biology and how the Baltimore BioCrew’s project relates to it. We determined that the topics would include information pertaining to synthetic biology, its significance, what phytoplankton is, its effects, and global warming. We formulated questions to ask on social media and decided on what facts to display based on what we learned from our iGEM project. We researched additional specific information online. Furthermore, we determined that the types of social media posts would include polls and quizzes to allow our audience to interact with the material, making learning more effective. Making the material eye catching, aesthetic, and including pictures ensures that viewers don’t skip over it.
Our target audience is local Baltimore and Maryland people, people with shared science based interests, students, and people who don’t have much knowledge of synthetic biology. We utilize a variety of platforms to reach these people and people outside this target audience.
Baltimore BioCrew Instagram Account
On the iGEM Instagram account, we reach science organizational accounts, students, local people, and people with shared interests and experience in science. On our personal Instagram accounts, we reach students, mostly young adults, local people, family members, friends, people with shared interests, and people who haven’t had experience with synthetic biology. On our iGEM Facebook account, we reach older people with shared interests and science organizations.
Our materials are used by people who don’t have much knowledge in the field and help them to be educated on a new important topic and learn how it affects them and the world in general. They learn through facts, polls, and quizzes. They’ll also help people who do have knowledge in the field to be educated on how the Baltimore BioCrew is utilizing synthetic biology to engineer phytoplankton to help reduce the rates of climate change. After participants select an incorrect answer on a quiz, they’re able to see the correct answer and learn from it.
To promote interactive learning, our social media posts have included quizzes that test the audience’s knowledge in basic areas relating to synthetic biology and additionally serve the purpose of engaging the audience through a casual media and informing them on subjects they aren’t aware of or don’t use on a regular basis. To further promote two-way communication, we have also included posts with polls and open-ended questions.
An example of one of our interactive synthetic biology-related quiz posts on our Instagram story asks “What is synthetic biology?” and gives the audience the choices: A field of science that involves… 1) making new biological parts; 2) engineering; 3) giving organisms new abilities; or all provided answers. This post has reached 137 views. All of our quizzes, along with our other informative posts on our Instagram story, are available in the highlights section title “Biocrew” on our page @buggslab.
Because the content of our social media page appeals more to the STEM community or other organizations/nonprofits in Baltimore, members of our high school iGem team have also promoted informational posts and quizzes on their personal pages as well. This has helped us reach a broader audience of other teenagers and young adults instead of only people who are already in the professional workforce. We also use Facebook to reach adults and older people who may not be involved in STEM. Additionally, more people are able to access our posts later on because they are saved in the highlights section of our Instagram page. We believe our content would reach a larger audience than we are able to record if the information we spread is discussed among those who have seen it or applied to education and real world problems, which would effectively increase engagement and interest in synthetic biology.
Instagram Story Posts
Views Over Time
Classes
We created a class called "Water you going to do about CO2?" that both educates and promotes environmental change and plans of action by teaching middle school students about the importance of phytoplankton and the natural environment. We began constructing our class with one big question: how can we help our students change the world? We tackled this by thinking of what our project is about and the importance it has on the environment. After many weeks of brainstorming and debating, we reached the conclusion that a class about marine biology, human environmental impact, and the future solution that could be generated by up and coming youth was the best class to provide. Hence the research process began.
Initially, it was difficult to focus on what main topics to teach, however after scouring the internet, we finally narrowed our topics to what we felt would be the most relevant and impactful:
- Ocean Environment and Marine Biology
- Phytoplankton
- Climate Change and Oceanography
- Climate Change and Phytoplankton
- Why Does it Matter and How People Can Help
After we established what to teach, our next goal was to decide how to teach our class.
Due to the current pandemic, we knew that teaching a class in person was not going to be safe nor physically possible. We developed a three-day, interactive online Zoom class that was held from 5-6 pm on Oct 20-22nd. We used multiple technological programs to assist us in making a learning environment where all students involved are able to express themselves. In order to appeal to different kinds of learners, we made a powerpoint for each unit, incorporating lots of videos and imagery from widely known platforms like Youtube, National Geographic, NASA, etc..online educational simulations, data, and real world examples. To make sure that all students were participating freely, we used programs like Jamboard and Padlet. Jamboard is an online platform where students are able to place post-it notes on an online bulletin board about a specific topic. We started every class with a warm up question to keep engagement and all of them take place on Jamboard. It is a very important platform because students can write freely and express their thoughts in an educational manner. Additionally, the students can see each other’s answers and understand different perspectives. Furthermore, Padlet is a program similar to Jamboard where students are able to write and answer questions working together. We used this platform mainly for collaboration assignments within our class. In that scenario, students are grouped together to answer questions about a specific article or video. This promotes teamwork and sharing ideas openly among fellow students. By encouraging the use of these platforms, we have provided an inviting environment for students to speak their mind.
We thought it was important to reach a younger audience in order to educate the future generation about what they can do now. However, we didn’t want an audience too young to fully understand the concept we wished to promote. According to the CDC, children between the ages of 11-14 have more complex thoughts and are in the process of developing a sense of right and wrong, which is why we felt that it was important to target them. Because they’re at the cusp of identifying their worldly view, we believe that educating them on the importance of the environment would be more impactful than any other age group.
We advertised this class on Eventbrite, so that middle schoolers were able to sign up easily.
We have made our class curriculum accessible to everyone on this website. We also made this curriculum accessible for other iGEM groups by helping the Baltimore Biocrew Collaboration team. By working with them, we created a condensed version of the curriculum where we emphasized only the significant topics. Our original curriculum was designed for a three-day class whereas their condensed version was for one day. This allowed the curriculum to reach other groups besides our team, so that the topic of phytoplankton and their importance is more widespread. As more people learn about phytoplankton, they are able to truly understand the purpose of our project.
Class Slides
UMD Meeting
In order to create an effective presentation, our iGEM team met with students from the University of Maryland’s Science, Technology, and Society Scholars program for a 2-hour lesson about science communication. This lesson served the purpose of teaching the Baltimore Biocrew team about the various forms that science communication comes in, and that each type has its own benefits and drawbacks, as well as appeals to certain types of people. We learned that because we would like our project to be easily understandable to the public- an audience that will ultimately decide if/how our project would be integrated into bodies of water- we need to use clear visuals and metaphors. Clear visuals would include graphs of our data and pictures of our process in the lab, and these would help connect complicated interpretations or techniques to more understandable images. Metaphors would be helpful because they help to simplify the project into terms that a broader audience would understand, but we would need to be sure that although we simplify some aspects of the project, we should not oversimplify it so much that important information is lost.