Science communication

Alongside the responsibility we had as a team in iGEM, we also felt we had a responsibility to spread knowledge of genetic engineering and inspire interest in STEM. As senior high school students, we saw opportunity in reaching out to younger children as we believe that educating them about synthetic biology would be the best way to inspire ethical innovation for the future generations.

Who to educate and how?

Through using a survey, our team could learn about the general understanding of synthetic biology and its applications from several different age groups as we sent the survey to students at our schools as well as parents and teachers. When asked, ‘How severe do you believe species endangerment is?’, across each age group in the survey, the average response was above 7 out of 10. However, we recognised that there were some disparities in the responses as some answered that species endangerment is not a serious issue, making it even more important for us to teach about our project and the issue we are trying to solve. Furthermore, in every age group the consensus was that coral is the most at threat of extinction. As coral reefs are the most biodiverse marine ecosystem in the world, we understood the importance of their protection and even collaborated with a team who’s project aims to reduce the harm caused to coral reefs, however, we also understood that this meant we must further stress the importance of general aquatic organism extinction not only coral reef endangerment. From this survey we could learn about how different age groups learnt about new scientific developments. In every age group but one, those surveyed said they learnt about the threat to aquatic organisms through documentaries so we thought making a video would be the most effective way to demonstrate our project.

Education videos

We created a video targeted towards the lower school, pupils aged 10-14, and kept it under two minutes so that the information was kept succinct and easy to understand. It included information about iGEM as a non profit organisation and about the competition that is held annually as we hoped to inspire young students to get excited and take part in iGEM in future years. We also explained the dangers that face the European Eel and how our project aimed to resolve this issue and prevent their extinction, without going too deep into the scientific terminology.

The video was shown to students at both City of London School and City of London School for Girls during their assembly time and as one of our team’s schools is an all girls school we felt it was important to not only encourage young students to get involved with synthetic biology but also stress that there is a place for women in STEM. We hope to continue having a mixed iGEM team of City of London School and City of London School for Girls as this will continue to make synthetic biology available for anyone who has an interest in it.

Our team also felt that it was important for there to be an open conversation, even with coronavirus restrictions, so we gave pupils the option to email us and organise an online meeting if they wanted to learn more. Alongside this we planned to make further resources available about iGEM and decided that when schools were to reopen we should hold a workshop at our school.

Leaflets

To supplement the video we created for the lower school, we also created a leaflet to put in the school newsletter so pupils from any year could learn more about the project. We explained that pupils with many different interests could get involved with iGEM as synthetic biology and science needs different perspectives and methods of thinking for it to advance safely, but rapidly. The leaflet also contained details of our project on the European Eel and explained the basis of iGEM and how by using synthetic biology anybody taking part in iGEM can try and tackle a real world issue and make a genuine difference. We also included a ‘how you can help’ section so that students could know what adjustments to make to their lives and make a positive difference to the aquatic ecosystem. Alongside changes that students could make to their lifestyle we really tried to stress that students could also make a change by writing to people in government or aquatic species conservation groups and by joining competitions such as iGEM. Although the level of science used in iGEM is of a high level, we felt that including information about how to get involved with iGEM would inspire young students to pursue biology and seek to learn more about the science used behind our project, encouraging them to join the team when they are the right age (16-17). However, for several parts of our project we needed help from all across the school so we made sure that if students wanted to help filming, editing, or organising workshop sessions, they could get in touch with us.

As well as educating the younger generations our team found it just as important to educate those who were not taught about these new aspects of biology formally at school. We noted that in our survey the majority of 50-59 year olds said they mainly gain knowledge from news articles and therefore we decided to make an adult friendly leaflet rather than a video similar to the one we made for our lower school. By doing this, our team aimed to explain the purpose of iGEM and the details of our project this year in a complex, but understandable form. We gave details on each individual team’s purpose including modelling, research, and wet lab so that parents could have a more comprehensive understanding of each component of the iGEM project and the process we went through to create and develop our solution. Should a parent want to learn more about synthetic biology after reading our leaflet, we made sure to include useful links which provided more complex information. As well as this, we advertised our own learning materials so that adults could experience a school style lesson from our own iGEM team should they wish to find out more. As with the leaflet for lower school, we aimed to make our project outreach more of a conversation rather than just a piece of information so we gave our emails to parents allowing them to contact us for further information. To make this leaflet accessible we put it on our schools’ newsletters to send to parents and teachers and also linked it to our school’s website so prospective students could learn more about the potential to learn about synthetic biology at our schools.

Learning

Learning materials for parents

As we advertised our teams learning materials on the leaflet that we released to the parents, we wanted to make a classroom style session available so if anyone wanted a live call we encouraged them to email us so we could organise a zoom meeting and discuss our project in more detail. To ensure the learning materials were always accessible, we put them on a google drive so that they could be viewed at any time. As well as this we made good use of the google drive as we also put our project’s promo video and the presentation video here. This meant that through just one one link on our leaflet (sent directly to parents and attached on our schools’ website), several materials to do with our project could be accessed and our team could be easily contacted for further information.

Lower school workshop

As we had a lot of interest in our iGEM project following on from the video we sent to lower school, we wanted to have a more interactive opportunity to teach young students about synthetic biology. Running a workshop was the perfect way to reach out to a class as we could build an understanding of synthetic biology while developing an excitement for iGEM and maintaining social distancing rules. We used a detailed powerpoint presentation which outlined DNA simply so that we could ease the students into the idea of synthetic biology. Then, after explaining the purpose of the iGEM competition, we told the students about our project on the European Eel. We highlighted the dangers that the eels face including both the chemical ones and physical ones.