Team:William and Mary/Practices

NOISE - W&M iGEM

Human practices

Adult Communication

After hearing the community's concerns about SynBio, we held workshops and seminars to clear misconceptions.

Youth Education

Synthetic biology can be a blast with the right approach. The 150 kids at our workshops sure thought so.

Long-Term Sustainability

We made a teacher-friendly curriculum to keep up the momentum long after the Jamboree.

Adult Communication

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Our curriculum will be available online for anyone to use for free. Additionally, teachers in the Williamsburg area can request in-class assistance or tutoring for the curriciulum from volunteers of College Partnership for Kids. CPK is a group of William and Mary students who tutor at local schools. CPK volunteers will recieve special training in order to tutor our Synthetic Biology Curriculum.

Knowledge of Synthetic Biology: The information we provided and taught to students and adults in our workshops will inspire them to look into Synthetic Biology and see scientific research as a more tangible career option. We have already recieved emails from parents whose kids couldn't stop talking about our workshops, and we feel certain that this enthusiasm for Synthetic Biology will carry them into the future.

Lab visits: We put our local public schools in contact with Dr. Saha, our iGEM PI, who will continue to organize and facilitate visits by classes to William and Mary Biology Department labs.

Long-Term Sustainability

Activities

Are optimized for grades 1-12

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Schools

Requested our curriculum to implement

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Locations

5 States, 3 countries: An international effort

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The Curriculum

Below, you'll find the latest draft of our synthetic biology curriculum. Because we are working on adjusting the curriculum to the needs of the educators who use it, this draft may soon become outdated. The most recent draft can be found at any time using the "CURRICULUM ON ISSUU.COM" link in the main menu. Future updates are to include: (1) adjusted learning objectives, so that the activities can be graded more easily, (2) explanations regarding which activities fall within the national Standards Of Learning (SOL) test materials, (3) extension activities, as some activities can be used with higher grade levels with supplementary materials, and (4) a references page: while the vast majority of activities were developed by the William & Mary iGEMs's outreach committee, a few were modified from existing experiments, and we used many sources for the background content listed.