Team:William and Mary/Practices

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.

Spreading Public Awareness of Our Project

We presented these two talks on project subjects: "What is Synthetic Biology?" by Elli Cryan and Joe Maniaci and "Biomath" by Andy Halleran and John Marken. We created an outreach blog directed at the general public about our project, iGEM, and Synthetic Biology as a whole. This blog recieved thousands of page views and was used by people around the world. We created and maintain a William & Mary iGEM 2015 Facebook and Twitter to spread awareness of our project. We conducted a survey that measured Synthetic Biology awareness and gauged public concerns about Synthetic Biology at our local farmer's market. Two articles about William and Mary iGEM were published in the Flat Hat, William & Mary's Newspaper: An article about our team and our outreach efforts: http://flathatnews.com/2015/09/15/students-participate-in-igem/ and an article by two team members, Elli Cryan and Panya Vij, about communicating science: http://flathatnews.com/2015/09/08/improving-communication-making-science-understandable/

Student Workshops

Workshops
We held a total of nine workshops about Synthetic Biology this summer, both in and out of our lab, all over the state of Virginia, for more than 150 students from Kindergarten to Pre-College, as well as adults.
1. Bruton High School Lab Visit, AP Biology Class: Emil Davis' AP Biology class from Bruton High School, a local public school, visited our lab during the first week of summer research when their school year was ending. We reviewed basic AP Biology concepts with them, showed them some protocols they had read about but never performed, such as gel electrophoresis, and taught them about lab safety.
2. King Solomon Christia Academy, June 26: We taught 1-3 graders at King Solomon Christian Academy's Summer Session program. They learned about codons and genes, modeled DNA structure, and predicted what traights an offspring of two individuals with specific alleles would have.
3. & 4. Learning Fun School, June 27, 1-3 grade and 4-6 grade w/ parent session We hosted two workshops at LFS. Each had an optional parent session during which we explained Synthetic Biology, iGEM, and our 2015 project. The students extracted DNA, learned about alleles and genes, interpretted codons, predicted offspring traits, visualized gel electrophoresis, and observed changes in protien structure after exposure to disturbances such as heat.
5. Saturday and Summer Enrichment Program Workshop, July 11, 4-6 grade: William and Mary's School of Education has a Center for Gifted Students program that runs events for students when they are not in school. We hosted 4-6 graders in our lab, where they got a firsthand look at our equiptment and our project. They even got to see our confocal microscope in action!
6. & 7. Girl Scout Synthetic Biology Badge Workshop, July 18; brownies, juniors; cadettes & ambassadors; parents session This summer, we developed a Synthetic Biology Girl Scout Badge through the Girl Scouts of America Make Your Own badge progam. We also hosted two workshops where girls could earn different levels of the badge, based on their age. They got to streak RFP colonies onto agar plates, check out our confocal microscope, extract banana DNA, model the structure of DNA with candy, and learn about plasmids and the parts of a gene.
8. PLUS-S, July 20 -24; Incoming College Freshmen: Every summer, William & Mary holds a week-long program for incoming freshmen interested in scientific research. This summer, four of the participants shadowed us in our lab every day for two hours. They had the opportunity to be exposed to the world of research and help us perform procedures such as inoculations, minipreps, and transformations.
9. Robotics First Lego League, August 1: A student-led robotics team from Northern Virginia drove down to Williamsburg to visit our lab and learn about Synthetic Biology and how the engineering concepts they use in robotics can be applied to biology. They also performed lab protocols with us, saw the confocal microscope, modeled DNA and different types of cells using candy and cookies. Future Workshops:
Smithsonian Q?rius Program Workshop: Later this fall we are providing a workshop at the Smithsonian's Natural History Museum in Washington D.C. through their Q?rius program, which provides regular, free workshops at the museum for children to gain exposure to science outside the classroom.

Parent Sessions

Parent sessions: Four of our nine workshops gave parents the opportunity to learn about synthetic biology, and half of those gave parents the opportunity to see our lab and discuss ethical questions about subjects pertaining to Synthetic Biology, such as GMO consumption and the morality of Synthetic Biology research. We also gave parents the opportunity to ask any questions and voice any concerns they had relating to Genetic Engineering and Synthetic Biology.

In Progress...

Michael Elowitz, whose paper about promoter noise inspired our project, has agreed to a skype interview with our team to discuss our project and how to better communicate science and scientific research.
The Williamsburg Library has agreed to distrubute free pamphlets about synthetic biology. These pamphlets will address concerns voiced in the survey we conducted. We are organizing more lab visits from schools and groups in our local community. We are also hosting a 2 hour event at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History on November 21, in their new Q?rius Lab. There, we will be sharing doing four of the activities from our curriculum with the public.

The Curriculum

After hosting our workshops, we compiled 24 of the activities we ran with participants into a single Synthetic Biology Curriculum. Each activity lists the procedure, background information, materials and cost for the activity, critical learning questions, and learning goals. We made an effort to keep the activities low-cost and used materials easily accessible to teachers. We included background information so that teachers with limited Biology background could easily run the activities. The curriculum includes worksheets, labs, and activities that can be completed by first graders to AP Biology students, and any age in between. The current version of the curriculum can be accessed here.
We worked with Bonnie Ellis, the Science Curriculum Coordinator of Williamsburg James City County Public Schools to ensure that our curriculum is usable and convientient for teachers.
Who we shared curriculum with:
We have already shared our curriculum with teachers all over the state, the country, and the world! Here in Williamsburg, we attended the Williamsburg James City County Teacher Training days to present our curriculum to all the science teachers in the county. In addition, we have given our curriculum to teachers all over the state. We now have teachers in five states who plan on running our curriculum. We also provided our curriculum upon request to teachers in China and, through the Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program, Malaysia.
We are still working on responding to all the requests for our curriculum! Currently, we are working on providing the Virginia state learning standards that each activity fulfills so that local teachers can seamlessly integrate our activities into their year-long schedules. We are also prviding local teachers with kits that include materials for our activities up until the date of the 2015 iGEM Jamboree.

Our original synthetic biology teacher curriculum is available online for anyone to use for free. This includes future iGEM teams looking to hold Synthetic Biology workshops and camps, as well as educators worldwide. 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 & 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.