Team:BroadRun-NorthernVA/Education and Public Outreach
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Education and Public Outreach
1. EDUCATION
Starting our iGEM team was no easy feat. We overcame many obstacles from financing our team to a lack of interest amongst peers, perhaps stemming from a lack of understanding of the power of science and engineering to bring social good. Our age group lead very busy lives with many heavily involved in sports, volunteer work, working part-time, or just keeping up with school. Synthetic biology and iGEM were unknown within our school community. Our earliest efforts through multiple information meetings, direct appeals to science teachers, did not bring in the students we needed. Also, with competing interests for the summer, we ran into problems of retaining students to do lab research in the summer months. We persisted despite these problems, and eventually assembled our geographically diverse, but passionate team seeking to explore synthetic biology as a potential means to solve world problems. Given our own experience with the lack of understanding of synthetic biology in particular, and the application of science and engineering in general, in our community, we placed a high priority to educate and inspire students at our school and also at the feeder middle school. Here is what we did.A. Farmwell Station Middle School
We emailed the principle of Farmwell Station Middle school and was contacted by Mrs Collins who wanted us to present to her 8th grade Physical Science classes that were just beginning to think about their research projects and who would be high school freshman next year. we made presentations to 4 classes and spoke to the minds of 84 students. Mrs. Collins wrote back to us regarding our time with her students, and here is what she said;
"I loved hearing your research! It is so important for the high school level students to come and show the middle school level students the amazing things that they can do in the future. This opened the eyes of many students of the important real world contributions which they can make even at their age. The most important take away of the presentation to them was...to just have interest is enough! ~ Mrs. Collins, September 18"
September 15 Presentation, Physical Science Class I of Mrs. Collins, 24 Students
We had a powerpoint presentation ready to share with the students. We introduced synthetic biology, iGEM, and then got into talking about the problem we were tackling through synthetic biology. We worked hard to keep it simple, but still explain the process of engineering our yeast cells, before we shared our actual results. We set aside about 15 min for questions. We also walked the students through how we started an iGEM team, and answered questions from how we got funded to our experience with lab work. Overall, the students showed much interest. One student in particular was extremely interested and was definitely wanting to do iGEM! We had another student ask us about our solution and whether it was patentable and how much money could be made. We used this question to explain the benefits to society from science that may not always involve huge monetary rewards and that the work itself is a reward.
September 15 Presentation, Physical Science Class II of Mrs. Collins, 16 Students
We repeated our presentation and took questions from the students. We used question time as an opportunity to give more information about how science had helped us to think more critically and that these are good skills to have even if we may not follow careers in science. We had students ask us if we got paid to do lab work over the summer. But we did tell them that remuneration is a real possibility for collegiate iGEM teams, notwithstanding the work skills they gain!
September 16 Presentation, Physical Science Class III of Mrs. Collins, 24 students
After presenting, we had lots of questions from this class. We almost ran over our allotted time.
When Mrs. Collins asked about how many students were interested in doing iGEM next year when they got to high school, we were so excited to see about 10 hands go up. Way to go !!!!
September 16 Presentation, Physical Science Class IV of Mrs. Collins, 20 Students
Some of the most probing questions were asked in this class; they went from “how much enzyme was being produced?” to “how that compares to the promoter?” Demonstrating a good grasp of what they had heard and a keen interest in the iGEM project, we were super pleased that we had connected with the students.
B. Broad Run High School
We approached Mrs. Rosperich, a science teacher. She already knew of the existence of our iGEM team from our school website, but became very excited when we explained to her what we had done over the summer with the Armstrong industrial waste water problem. Having more concrete information to share about our experience after having completed our iGEM project, we felt better positioned to reach out to our peers and Mrs. Rosperich, who was eager for us to share our work during her classes.
September 14 Presentation, Research Biology Class of Mrs. Rosperich, 33 Students
We had a powerpoint presentation ready to share with the students. We introduced synthetic biology, iGEM, and then got into talking about the problem we were tackling through synthetic biology. We worked hard to keep it simple, but still explain the process of engineering our yeast cells, before we shared our actual results. We set aside about 15 min for questions. Being a freshman class, we found that there were a number of students wanting to know more about our project and iGEM. They also were interested in the Jamboree and learning that there were going to be many college students. We feel we made a step forward in getting our students acquainted and perhaps more than a slight interest in getting involved with science.
September 14 Presentation, AP Environmental Science Class of Mrs. Rosperich, 32 Students
We followed the same presentation and questioning period as for the previous class. We received good feedback and answered many questions.
2. PUBLIC ENGAGEMENT
A. ARMSTRONG Outreach
As mentioned elsewhere in this wiki, we reached out to several businesses, but with our sponsor Armstrong, we got the opportunity to begin a dialogue that has taken Armstrong into considering synthetic biology as a possible option to address their waste water problem. We believe, this is partnership that has grown over the course of this iGEM project, has educated us both on using science as a vital platform to explore alternative solutions, and is one of our team’s most valuable public engagement and outreach successes.
B. TELOS Outreach, August
Adriel Sumathipala, our business partnership team lead, made contact with Telos’ VP, Lisa Kimball, and got an opportunity to talk to them about our iGEM team. He presented to Lisa Kimball, CEO John Wood, and 9 other Telos employees in the month of August. He gave a brief overview of what iGEM was accomplishing through advancing synthetic biology, about our project solving a real world problem of Armstrong's, how we travel more than an hour to do our research in Baltimore at BUGSS, and of course how we were progressing with our work. The meeting ended on a positive note, with much interest sparked in synthetic biology solutions, followed up with requests from Telos to share our results, which we did.
C. TELOS and SWAN LEGEND Outreach, September 16
Marissa and Adriel Sumathipala made a brief presentation before John Wood and Lisa Kimball of Telos, and Fred Schaufeld, Founder of Swan Legend, a venture capitalist firm, about our iGEM project, rapidly covering the content of our project; problem, solution, results, and future work. As supporters of technology and community, they were interested in what we were doing and after that meeting generously agreed to fund our trip to the Jamboree!!! Thank you Telos and Swan Legend, we are so grateful to your community support. Through our iGEM project, we have informed business leaders of our community about synthetic biology, and created greater awareness of youth initiatives like our iGEM team’s vision to turn science into solving problems and useful products.
Telos and Swan Legend extended their community support by taking us over to Howard Hughes Medical Institute's Janelia Farm Research Campus to meet very briefly with Director Dr. Gerald Rubin, where we got to speak briefly of our iGEM and other research.
CONCLUSIONS