General Observations
Overall we were very impressed with the progress the year 7 and year 8 students made throughout the sessions. There were many well-argued and considered responses made with maturity beyond their years.
The team responded well to student stimuli for the most part. The planning left a suitable amount of flexibility for team members to react to different situations which may arise. For instance, the pineapple jelly experiment failed but fortunately we had the foresight to prepare backup samples made the night before.
Successes
In terms of ethical discussion, the fact that students were learning at a much faster rate than we expected meant that the quality and depth of discussion was excellent. In particular, we were able to touch on a few key points such as luck egalitarianism, levelling down objections to equality, John Rawl’s difference principle and original position, as well as libertarianism. Students were able to see the basis of reasoning behind conflicting perspectives on a given issue.
In terms of experiments, students quickly grasped the science behind each activity. We believe this is due to the clear presentation as well as heavy motivation in non-scientific activities done prior to each experiment such as the protein link game. This allowed students to anticipate the idea behind an experiment and thus make very good predictions.
Overall, students responded positively to all of our activities and we met the majority of our learning outcomes.
With regards to teacher responses, we are confident that we have built a strong relationship with the high school for future iGEM projects run at the ANU.
Challenges
The main difficulty was in controlling the class during some of the more interactive activities. With 2 team members per 7 students and groups of 3-4, it meant that there were inevitably some groups were left to their own devices for several minutes at a time. This is not necessarily a bad thing since it gives time for students to independently move the discussion forward but given the age group of 12-14, discussion often went out of control. Were a teacher from the school not present, it is possible the session may have run out of control. In the future, greater team presence is needed.
In parallel, group discussion became difficult to moderate after the class concluded that there was no intrinsic value to equality and subsequently that morals were just a matter of how one felt. Whilst this was an identifying marker of a pluralist view of knowledge, we believed that the position seemed to be more indicative of “giving up”, likely due to being unable to come up with a “good” solution to the ethical problem presented.
We believe students may have formed the perception: given that there is no sufficiently convincing argument for equality, the teacher probably wants us to say equality has no value at all. Thus we believe due to the way we presented the activity, students approached the problem as “guessing the teacher’s password.” In the future, I think a more social constructivist approach to the session may be necessary to avoid presenting team members as strict authority figures from whom tablets of capital T truth may be obtained. Instead perhaps team members should be presented more like mentors who are there to help with the discussion and to facilitate a learning environment. This is difficult however as the school already presented the team as “young scientists from the ANU”.
As we expected, certain points where discussion became tangential. This is not always a bad thing but the amount of time we expected would be spent on getting back on track was much longer than we expected. In the future, we should allocate more freeform time to each activity to avoid pacing issues.
