Team:FSU/Education
In the state of Florida, only two teams regularly participate in iGEM: Florida State University and the University of Florida. To promote synthetic biology as a viable solution to medical, environmental, and many other kinds of problems in Florida, we decided to team up with the University of Florida’s iGEM team to raise awareness about the iGEM competition to other schools in Florida. Because a lot of scientific advancements are made in the academia realm, we decided to create a promotional video advocating for Florida schools to get involved in iGEM. We debated on giving an in-depth presentation of our two projects but thought we would be able to better encapsulate our projects within a discussion of iGEM for more context on the competition. We targeted high schools near our respective universities because we believe that we would be able to mentor teams that are located closer to us in future years. However, we posted our video to YouTube to promote outreach to other high schools and colleges in Florida. Zoom has proven to be a great tool and could easily be used to mentor teams across the state when developing their iGEM programs.
In our video, we discuss an overview of the process of iGEM, design thinking, and how the jamboree works. It is our hope that the video we created would be used as a reference for schools that develop an iGEM team and may not know where to start. We also included brief descriptions of each teams’ projects to pique the students’ interests on the endless possibilities of the competition. The script was created by FSU’s team, the video was edited by UF’s team, and finding footage for the video was split 50/50. We were able to showcase the video to two local schools: James S. Rickards High School in Tallahassee, Florida and College Academy at Broward College in Davie, Florida. Luckily, we were able to present and host a Q&A session with students at College Academy. They seemed very interested in the idea of creating an iGEM team and asked a lot of valuable questions. Some of these included general questions about iGEM like the sections that a team is broken into and their tasks, what kind of problems can be tackled, and the timeline of the iGEM season. They also had specific questions related to our individual projects including the goal of each project, how the projects get funded, and the possibility of implementation in the real world.
Overall, the promotion of iGEM to spread awareness of synthetic biology seemed to interest high school students preparing for college. This could feed into the creation of iGEM teams at other universities in Florida, which would in turn lead to the development of genetic engineering solutions to complicated problems facing the state. We plan to continue outreach to other high schools and universities in Florida for future mentorships and partnerships in the development of more iGEM teams.
The video is also on the FSU iGEM YouTube Channel so it will continue to serve as a tool for science communications.