Team:CCA San Diego/Education

Education

Gold Medal Criterion #6

We hosted a two-week virtual summer camp, lasting from August 10 to August 21, that taught introductory topics in synthetic biology to middle school and high school students. After camp, we decided to adapt some of our material into an archive for wider distribution. The archive itself currently stands at 57 pages. We translated the first section of our archive to Korean, Chinese, Spanish, and provided a text to speech format. Finally, we shared our material globally using social media platforms such as Instagram and Youtube.

Best Education Special Prize

We held a two-week synthetic biology/research summer camp that doubled as a fundraiser. We offered scholarships to students to increase inclusivity and received positive feedback and constructive criticism from participants. Following our camp’s success, we adapted our curriculum into a written and video format and distributed it via Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube (which were clips from our camp). We integrated feedback from three teachers into this 57-page written curriculum, and included engaging, open-ended questions and interactive images to cater to visual learners, the deaf, and those with intellectual disabilities. To further increase inclusivity, we translated our document into three languages and provided a text-to-speech option for people with visual disabilities. Finally, we held a quiz/survey to assess the effectiveness of our curriculum, integrating user feedback to improve it. After being exposed to our curriculum, participants improved by an average of 4 points out of 10 on the quiz.