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Revision as of 00:08, 9 September 2015
Human Practices
Outreach:
Twice every week, CCA iGEM students went to a nearby elementary school, Solana Ranch Elementary, to tutor the students there. The tutoring was available to all students at the school, meaning we were working with kids in grades ranging from kindergarten to the sixth grade. This posed a unique challenge as we might be working with a seven year old one minute and an eleven year old the next, everyone with varying levels of skill. We focused on the children’s learning needs above all, representing ourselves as an iGEM team. We helped them achieve their educational goals while also emphasizing the importance of STEM (Science Technology Engineering Mathematics) subjects. It’s really amazing to think that we could have inspired a future scientist, but above that, knowing that we definitely gave the little ones something to look forward to, which is huge in a child’s life.
We put an emphasis on STEM (Science Technology Engineering Mathematics) subjects, but were there to promote the general importance of learning. A special emphasis was placed on actually understanding the concepts that were being covered in the kids’ homework assignments, not just quickly finishing the assignment as fast as possible. This encouraged the kids to realize and appreciate the importance of putting effort into a project to understand it, rather than getting the correct answer while not knowing how they got to that result. This was a challenge sometimes; explaining the fundamentals of fractions to a child who had never heard of the word “denominator” before made us self conscious on how to present our tutoring advice.
The elementary school kids were not the only ones that had benefitted from this experience; the iGEM Team also learned from this interaction. We had to develop new communications skills that were necessary to communicate with the students regarding their assignments; especially with the younger children, it was a challenge to explain basic but important concepts without using terms we (as highschool students) already found natural to implement in our conversations. We learned how to communicate clearly and effectively with the students so that they could understand our explanations, which is an important tool in the STEM field, especially in that of popularizing science.