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Education

Innovative educational tools and outreach activities have the ability to establish a two-way dialogue with new communities by discussing public values and the science behind synthetic biology.

Introduction

During the course of our project, the Education and Outreach team has been focusing on sharing our work and teaching people about the relevance of synthetic biology in our modern world. With projects of different formats and for different audiences, our goal has been to explain the importance of degrading plastic, especially through our method, and fighting the stigmas that come with bioengineering organisms.

1. BSP Presentation


Our first project was to give a presentation about iGEM and our goal to reduce plastic pollution and produce ethanol through synthetic biology. This presentation was hosted in Hiram Bingham, a private school in our country, as part of a BSP, which is the group of the British Schools of Peru, event. It was directed to students of varying ages, which was beneficial for us to ensure a wide reach of our content.

For this event, we started with the creation of the PowerPoint, that would serve as guiding for the speaker and visual help for the audience. As the presentation was more of an introduction of iGEM for the student, and given the limited time we were given for our turn, we decided to tackle just key points. This included what is iGEM, what is synthetic biology and its importance, what is our project, and its impact on our community. The PPT relied more on visual elements than text, as most of the information was to be given orally by our speaker Raquel Carrion, part of the SynBio team.

While it was a shame that we could not have more time to speak (5 minutes was the maximum), all the information we prepared was delivered correctly. As most of the students, to not say all, were not presented with the idea of synthetic biology before, we believe this was a good introduction to them. This was further achieved given the usage of Spanish instead of English, as their native language ensured a clear comprehension of what we were explaining.

2. SynBio Book

Our next work was a short book that mainly described synthetic biology titled “SynBio for Babies”. Taking inspiration from those popular science books “for babies”, with this project we aimed to communicate the basics of synthetic biology in a way that could be easily understandable, even for young kids. Moreover, the layout of children’s books, with the limited text and colourful graphics, provided a fun way to learn about science and, hence, motivate people to be interested in this topic.


We started with a brief draft of what each page of the book intended to contain, done in Google Docs for easy access between members. We started with the easiest terms, such as what was biology, which led to what is synthetic biology. Then, we delved into the more difficult aspects, such as explaining cells, DNA, or genes. We also managed to explain the relevance of synthetic biology in our society, as this is one of our main goals as the Education team.

With the draft finalized, we moved on with creating the book digitally. This was a mostly easy task, just transferring the text to their corresponding page. What took a bit more was creating the drawings, an essential part for this project to be attractive to our target audience. This final version was translated into both Spanish and English, to ensure a wider reach in our country. While we plan to generally distribute this e-book, our main plan is organizing a reading session with younger kids of one school. Here, after showing them the book, we plan to ask them simple questions targeting their understanding and their growth in interest in science to determine the effectiveness of this project.

3. FDR Club Fair Stand


After, we moved onto our next project: our participation in a club fair hosted by the school Franklin D. Roosevelt. We had a stand in this event to talk about what was iGEM and our project goal with the students of this school. For it, we prepared thoroughly to ensure we had enough content to share, starting with a brochure that served as an introduction to our team. There, we tackled the basics of iGEM and our project, what was the problem we wanted to solve and how we intended to do so. Besides helping us share the usefulness of synthetic biology to help solve an environmental issue, it also served as a tool to motivate students to joining our team. While some copies were printed out, we mostly left it as digital with a QR code for access, as it made it easily sharable.

Another material created for this event was a poster, which shared similar information as the brochure. However, this was kept permanently in our stand, so the information was always visible to the students. It also helped make the stand more visually appealing as to attract more people to it. With part of our team participating in the event, sharing our project and answering questions of the students, it was a fruitful experience for us to convey the importance of synthetic biology in our world.

4. Speech


Then, there was a speech that was to be delivered in some private schools of Lima for students between the ages of 13 to 16. This speech was not a very long one, consisting of approximately 2000 words for a maximum of 15 minutes, but it was very thorough in the information it included. From all our projects, this was the one that tackled more in depth everything our team did. Not only did it include the usual explanation of what is iGEM or synthetic biology; but also the scientific details of our process, the challenges we encountered, and the community impact of our goal. This was all written in Spanish, as the first school we got in contact with, the San Agustin, had this preference. Nevertheless, it only serves to make the information clearer to the students that may struggle with their second language.

While the San Agustin was the first school that accepted our proposal, they moved the date for the fourth bimester of their syllabus, during the months of October and November. Another school, Innova, did the same.

5. Talk with “Euroamericano” school


Our final project was giving a talk to 10th and 11th graders from the “Euroamericano” school. For this, we first prepared a script with the topics we wanted to talk about and the distribution between the participants (5 students, 4 from FDR and one from Hiram Bingham, as well as one team mentor). Here, we included different topics from previous projects, like explaining the history of synthetic biology. It was a quite complete script, which allowed us to properly convey everything iGEM entails to the students.

Moreover, we prepared a presentation that would serve as visual help for the audience. While this was mostly images or graphs that aligned with the script, we also added fun interactive activities for the students. For instance, we did a game where the students had to put their thumbs up or down depending on whether they believe that synthetic biology was acceptable or not to use in a situation presented. This made the audience more engaged with the information, which proved to be fruitful given the interest they demonstrated afterwards.

After the talk, some students stopped to ask us some questions about joining iGEM or creating a team, and many more asked for our Instagram to follow us and keep being up-to-date with our projects. Hence, we determined that we did indeed manage to capture the interest of most and motivate others to join this initative.