Education
As part of our educational outreach associated with our project we aimed to educate sixth form students across the UK in two ways:
1) The UK wide iGEM collaboration which sought to develop a mini lecture series as well as a textbook introducing students to the concept of synthetic biology and iGEM itself.
2) An interactive and flexible workshop which encouraged students to be creative and reveal the interdisciplinary possibilities of their prospective careers.
3) A series of educational TikToks and Instagram posts @igem_warwick, documenting our iGEM journey over the summer, and focusing on key synthetic biology topics and information on further education!
BioLogix - The iGEM UK education collaboration
This year, we took part in the BioLogix collegiate UK iGEM collaboration, initiated by the King’s College London iGEM team, aimed at remedying the lack of high school exposure to synthetic biology. The aim of this collaboration was to develop an educational package designed to be delivered to the local student community (16-19y/o). Our package contained:
1) Lecture slides for an introduction into Synthetic Biology and the tools/processes commonly used in the lab.
2) A series of chapters also covering the same topics as a part of the larger BioLogix compiled textbook. This textbook has been uploaded here.
3) A short 3-5 minute video explaining our BioMonix project, going into a bit of depth about our iGEM experience!
Reflection
Locally, we aimed to deliver our lecture series as a follow-up to our introductory iGEM workshops, to sustain contact with the schools we visited and foster longer term interactions. Unfortunately we were unable to continue as the wiki deadline was fast approaching, but we aim to deliver at least one more lesson at our local school partners after the jamboree.
The Warwick iGEM Workshop series
Our motivation
The growing nature of synthetic biology is facilitated by the outreach and public engagement the subject has with university students, however we imagine the future innovations in synthetic biology should target below undergraduates and inspire more students to enter the field.
Our idea
We decided that in order to engage students with the content we would need an interactive lesson rather than a lecture series. Therefore, we decided to produce a workshop. The workshop aimed to reduce the experience of iGEM into a digestible 1-2 hour taster session in which students were put into teams to come up with their own synthetic biology projects to solve a current problem. Students then had to present this project whilst meeting certain criteria that got them thinking about relevant degree subjects and career fields, on a poster and deliver it to their class. After this there was a small judging system in which the team members decided on the winners of three categories ‘most creative project’ ‘best solution’ and ‘best presentation’. Winners were awarded chocolates which were great incentives to keep them engaged. We had really positive responses from the sixth formers and some of their project posters can be found below…
Reflection
Team BioMonix was able to visit 3 schools, Hedingham School and Sixth Form, Drapers Academy Sixth Form and Barr's Hill Secondary School, before the wiki freeze. All of these schools are from disadvantaged areas, and also have lower rates of advancement into further education. This is why it was crucial for our workshop to be interactive and leave a lasting impression with the students, to help erase any doubt if further education is for them. Our diverse backgrounds aided us to bridge that gap between teacher and student. However, for future iGEM teams we would've improved upon our workshop by having multiple workshops at different age groups, perhaps scale down to GCSE level, and have longer running collaboration with the schools. This is a limitation in the UK as the iGEM deadline happens to be close to the start of term for UK schools and therefore we cannot run many collaborations over summer. Having said that, we believe this workshop our other educational material will prove to be a great stepping stone for other iGEM teams around the world that have more favourable term starts!