Difference between revisions of "Team:ANU-Canberra/scienceact"

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<li><a href="https://2015.igem.org/Team:ANU-Canberra/overview">Overview</a></li>
 
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<a href="https://2015.igem.org/Team:ANU-Canberra/questacon" class="image featured"><img src="https://static.igem.org/mediawiki/2015/7/7a/Questacon.jpg" alt="" /></a>
 
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<h3>Questacon SciNight - "Good Vibrations"</h3>
 
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<p>Questacon, the National Science and Technology Centre, held an aptly themed SciNight focussing on light and sound on Friday 14 August. SciNights are held just for adults, including many university students.
 
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<h3>Science in ACTion - at the Old Bus Depot Markets</h3>
 
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<p>We will play three “moral games” (recommended by UNESCO) to clarify learner intuitions. Furthermore, through these games, the learner will understand that every ethical perspective is informed by specific reasoning processes leading to a pluralism of opinions. By examining these processes in the context of hard facts, the learner will gain a more nuanced understanding of their position on an ethical issue.</p>
 
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As part of National Science Week 2015, we teamed up with the Australian Research Council Centres of Excellence for Translational Photosynthesis and Plant Energy Biology to run stalls at events aimed at promoting science and science engagement to the general public. We also ran a stall at ANU Open Day to show the work being done by ANU undergraduates to current and prospective students.
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We presented the memory wire and the polystyrene ball and pipe cleaner activities, as well as a SYBR Safe stained agarose DNA gel and a plate of bacteria expressing various fluorescent proteins.
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“We all had a fantastic time presenting our project, and seeing all of the other exhibits and presentations that were being held throughout the evening. It was great to see how many people came to the event and were excited about all of the science-themed exhibits on offer. I was amazed at how many people were interested in the work we presenting, particularly given that we were competing for attention against dazzling light displays, animal eye dissections, and air hockey-playing robots!
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It was pretty challenging to gauge the science literacy of all those who visited our stall, so we aimed to present our work with the use of simple, but clear analogies that we hoped everyone could understand! Throughout the night we presented our work to well over 100 people, with many asking questions for 15 minutes or longer – a fantastic level of engagement. It was great to show people the sorts of things that we can achieve with genetic engineering and how we can aim to address some of the ethical concerns many people have with this technology.” <i>(Conor)</i>
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“People came from a range of backgrounds, from a guy who’d worked in IT for years (but had a keen interest in genetics) to a second year medical science student. We had to gauge how much science people knew and tailor our explanation to that. We’d come up with a spiel before the event but throughout the night gradually refined it, such as the order in which we presented the activities, the bits of the explanation to leave out and the jargon and analogies that we used. Everyone enjoyed seeing the fluorescent DNA and proteins and were quite impressed by the logic of how we could use our split protein system to cut DNA! People asked us questions like how could our system be applied to treat disease and what would happen if recombinant DNA technology turned humans into zombies… It was a great atmosphere and a lot of fun, but very exhausting!” <i>(Janelle)</i>
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                                    “Amazing! I learnt something that I had never thought possible 11/10” <i>(Quote from Questacon visitor)</i>
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The aim of our activities was to have a simple, interactive demonstration of the basic concepts of our project (and synthetic biology in general). We used memory wire to demonstrate how light could change the shape of proteins and simple polystyrene ball and pipe cleaner models to represent protein interactions and modularity.
 
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“Conveying the aspects of genetic engineering to understand the principles of optogenetics is a difficult task when the recipient may have limited scientific knowledge. I quickly realised it was not possible to take a long educational path from the structure to DNA to genes then proteins and their interactions. Instead, beginning with a demonstration of the conformational change induced in Nitinol wire, it was simple to capture attention and move towards the structure function relationship in biochemistry while using the Nitinol wire as an analogy to the CRY2 protein in the presence of blue light. I believe this strategy delivered the core ideas of our project well and was met by most as a completely novel concept. Feedback was very positive and many people were intrigued as to ask further questions, mainly relating to the lab methods. I really enjoyed the challenge of refining my knowledge of the project to a form that was appropriate for a general audience and found it rewarding when this sparked a genuine interest in the iGEM team.” <i>(Henry)</i> </p>
 
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Revision as of 13:17, 17 September 2015

Science in ACTion

We presented the memory wire and the polystyrene ball and pipe cleaner activities, as well as a SYBR Safe stained agarose DNA gel and a plate of bacteria expressing various fluorescent proteins.

“We all had a fantastic time presenting our project, and seeing all of the other exhibits and presentations that were being held throughout the evening. It was great to see how many people came to the event and were excited about all of the science-themed exhibits on offer. I was amazed at how many people were interested in the work we presenting, particularly given that we were competing for attention against dazzling light displays, animal eye dissections, and air hockey-playing robots!

It was pretty challenging to gauge the science literacy of all those who visited our stall, so we aimed to present our work with the use of simple, but clear analogies that we hoped everyone could understand! Throughout the night we presented our work to well over 100 people, with many asking questions for 15 minutes or longer – a fantastic level of engagement. It was great to show people the sorts of things that we can achieve with genetic engineering and how we can aim to address some of the ethical concerns many people have with this technology.” (Conor)

“People came from a range of backgrounds, from a guy who’d worked in IT for years (but had a keen interest in genetics) to a second year medical science student. We had to gauge how much science people knew and tailor our explanation to that. We’d come up with a spiel before the event but throughout the night gradually refined it, such as the order in which we presented the activities, the bits of the explanation to leave out and the jargon and analogies that we used. Everyone enjoyed seeing the fluorescent DNA and proteins and were quite impressed by the logic of how we could use our split protein system to cut DNA! People asked us questions like how could our system be applied to treat disease and what would happen if recombinant DNA technology turned humans into zombies… It was a great atmosphere and a lot of fun, but very exhausting!” (Janelle)

“Amazing! I learnt something that I had never thought possible 11/10” (Quote from Questacon visitor)