Team:Purdue/Education

Purdue iGEM Page

Education

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has forced many institutions to change the way they educate their students. The result is a new wave of virtual education. Virtual education or online education greatly provides an opportunity to make education more accessible. Taking advantage of this new trend, Purdue iGEM decided to develop free accessible educational content on synthetic biology for highschooler all over the US. Given the ambitiousness of our goal, we decided to reach out to other teams to make our project a collaborative effort. Through our collaboration with Michigan State iGEM, Ohio State iGEM, University of Maryland iGEM, William and Mary in, and Cornell iGEM we were able to develop an educational YouTube crash course series called "Breaking Down Synthetic Biology."

What is Breaking Down Synthetic Biology?

Breaking Down Synthetic Biology is YouTube synthetic biology crash course series focused on the education of synthetic biology. Our YouTube series consists of two kinds of Videos

  • General Education Videos
  • Learn More(Advanced topics for Highschoolers)

Our "General Education" videos were created to educate individuals of all ages and knowledge levels on the basics of synthetic biology and debunk common misconceptions around synthetic biology topics such as Genetically Modified Organisms and the perils of genome editing. Our "Learn More" videos are videos specifically for highschool students to provide them with basic to intermediate knowledge on synthetic biology concepts, applications, and protocols. We also developed a check for understanding Google survey for each of the videos currently on our channel.

Link to our YouTube Channel

Breaking Down Synthetic Biology Team Workflow

Due to the volume of individuals working on this project, we developed the following inter-team workflow structure:

  • Script Writing Team: Responsible for writing the educational and general video scripts
  • Peer Editing: each script was peer-edited by 2 different teams
  • Narration Team: Responsible for audio narration of the scripts
  • Animation Team: Responsible for developing unique and creative visual animations for each video script and creating a common introduction video
  • Video Assembly Team: Responsible for combining the narration and visuals and uploading the finalized videos to youtube

Our Test Curriculum

Throughout the summer the Breaking Down Syn-Bio team developed a curriculum with over 30+ topics ranging from basic to advanced. The team also successfully completed over 15+ written scripts for the videos. As lofty as our goals were, we quickly realized due to the bottleneck in the animation department across the teams we would not be able to complete all of the videos over the course of the summer. So instead we decided to develop a test curriculum consisting of a couple of General Education and Learn More videos to send out to educators to assess the efficacy and design of our educational series before making more videos. Here is a PDF version of our test curriculum that was sent out to high school educators:

Test Curriculum Implementation Results

After reaching out to several high schools regarding the implementation of our curriculum, we received a wonderful email from a couple of biology teachers from Tipton High School located in Tipton Indiana. Two of the high school biology teachers there were excited and willing to implement our test curriculum in their freshman and senior biology classes. One of the freshman biology teachers by the name of Michael Galuska showed his students our General Education video on Genome Editing and will be showing his students one of our advanced videos later on in the week(10/26/2020-10/30/2020). Here are the results collected from Mr. Galuska's students:

Click to download the excel document containing student responses to the questions. Names and emails of the students were omitted for privacy reasons.

Click to see the genome editing video watched by students.

Summary of Educational Crash Course Results

Currently around 28 students participated and are currently participating in our test curriculum. Overall the crash course series was successful in providing the students from Tipton High School with new knowledge regarding a synthetic biology concept, in their case genome editing.As shown in the results below the topics of the videos and check for understanding questions were found to be mildly challenging. However, their knowledge on the topic of the video did increase suggesting the video was effective at educating the students.


Difficulty Rating Scale Used:


Knowledge Rating Scale Used:


Average Score
Video Content Difficulty 4.79
Check for Understanding Question Difficulty 5.47
Knowledge on Genome Editing Prior to the Video 4.59
Knowledge on Genome Editing After the Video 6.07

Table Summarizing the Overall Efficacy of the Test Curriculum

Feedback From Mr.Galuska

After implementing the first half of our test curriculum in his classroom, we reached out Mr.Galuska to get an educators perspective on our curriculum. Here is his review of our test curriculum:

Areas of success

"Quality of videos: good animations, good audio with only minor hiccups

Variety of topics: even though it is the beginning of the project there are lots of topics

Simplicity of videos (for the most part): the majority of videos were easy to understand (even if my main critique is that they were a little difficult to understand). Your team was able to take hard biology concepts and make an interesting and factual video."

Areas of improvement

"Overall, my biggest area of improvement would be making the content a little more accessible to people with limited biology knowledge. They are really close to being perfect, hence I thought it was an area of success, However, I felt like there were moments where the information was a little unclear without previous background info.


Check for understanding questions: very difficult for freshmen experiencing biology for the 1st time. Very wordy and difficult for some students to understand. They are good questions, but I think the wording could be improved. Intermediate videos: For the most part I think they would go beyond my student's heads. Beginning students would feel lost in them. However, they would be perfect for more advanced biology classes but a little difficult for my students to understand.

Overall, I really enjoyed the videos, and I think the students did as well. It was a nice break from the regular tasks during a normal class period. If you need any more information now or in the future, let me know. If you have any projects in the future that a high school teacher can help out with let me know. I look forward to watching your future videos."



To see how we plan on integrating the quantitative and qualitative assessment of the data collected regarding our Breaking Down Synthetic Biology crash course check out our Phase 2 Plan.