Difference between revisions of "Team:Washington/Practices"

Educational Outreach

Participation in Local STEM Events

At the University of Washington, we believe that iGEM is as much about educating the public about synthetic biology as it is about practicing it. Our team is passionate about fostering a love for science and engineering in younger members of our community and engaging with parents about cutting edge solutions to real-world problems. Every year, we volunteer at local science fairs and STEM events, sharing our research and promoting interest in the biological sciences.

This year, we worked to further the reach of our programs by visiting more events and creating more engaging exhibits. To this end, we developed a set of hands-on activities mainly geared towards 3rd grade through 6th grade students. We asked students to help us solve a fictional mystery, in which a famous synthetic biologist had been murdered and students could help us identify the killer based on three pieces of evidence. Dubbed “CSI: Seattle,” our exhibit allowed students to try their hand at DNA purification from strawberries, identifying fluorescent proteins and chromoproteins in yeast and bacteria, and performing a pH test. You can view the worksheet from our activity here.

We hosted exhibits at the Washington State Science and Engineering Fair in Bremerton, the Shoreline STEM Festival, the Edmonds STEM Expo, Sanislo and Bennett Elementary Science Fairs, and UW's Engineering Discovery Days. At each, our activity was well-received and allowed us to inform both students and parents about our work in paper diagnostics and synthetic biology. We were also able to adapt our curriculum for different audiences, downsizing for smaller fairs and emphasizing different aspects of our experiments for different age groups. At some events, such as the Shoreline STEM Festival and Edmonds STEM Expo, we were able to reach out to high school students who wanted first-hand information about college STEM programs.

Community Engagement

Experiment.com Crowdfunding Campaign

Recently, iGEM has taken steps to engage with its rapidly-growing group of alumni. At the University of Washington, we are following this lead and are working to create relationships with our team’s alumni. Thus, we were excited when Cindy Wu and Denny Luan, alumni of the Washington 2010 team, reached out to us about fundraising through their company, Experiment.com. This platform specifically caters to science projects, allowing independent researchers or research teams like us to gain funding without grants. This campaign allowed us to connect with alumni and other like-minded scientists, and gave us the opportunity to share more details of our project with our networks and the broader scientific community.

USEED Crowdfunding Campaign

In order to raise funds for our research and conference expenses, we also worked with USEED, an innovative crowdfunding platform that contracts with the University of Washington to fund student projects. This platform is unusual in that it allows people to make non-profit donations and 100% of funds raised go towards the project. Through this campaign, we were not only able to ensure that our students could move forward in their research and attend the Giant Jamboree, but we were also able to engage our community in a dialogue about our research. While many view science as an elite field only accessible to those who study it for many years, we wanted to connect our friends and family to our work and show that it can help solve problems that we all face on a daily basis.

Running this campaign also forced us to build the entrepreneurial skills necessary to transfer science from the laboratory to the people that it could most benefit. We used videos, writing, blogs, and social media to communicate to our shared vision of the beneficial role of genomic engineering in our community and across the world.

For more information, please see the Practices Hub.

Some Human Practices topic areas

• Philosophy
• Public Engagement / Dialogue
• Education
• Product Design
• Scale-Up and Deployment Issues
• Environmental Impact
• Ethics
• Safety
• Security
• Public Policy
• Law and Regulation
• Risk Assessment

What should we write about on this page?

On this page, you should write about the Human Practices topics you considered in your project, and document any special activities you did (such as visiting experts, talking to lawmakers, or doing public engagement).

Inspiration

As a team located in Seattle, Washington seafood is a common culinary delight. As synthetic biologists, we are very aware of Harmful Algal Blooms (HABs). This June, all west coast newspapers reported on the largest west coast toxic algal bloom to date. Current testing methods are expensive and need 24-48 hours in a lab. We were curious if an inexpensive and quick shellfish toxin biosensor could be created using synthetic biology.

In order to find out if there was a need for a device like this in the community. We spoke with local businesses and shellfish growers in the community. We tried to reach a representative in the local government but to no success.

Our project is in the early developmental stage, however it is feasible that our biosensor could be developed in the future into a functional shellfish biotoxin sensor. A biosensor, that could be cheaper, faster and more portable than current detection methods

Integrated Human Practices