BioMonix in Schools
On average, in our local area of Coventry, only 46.4% of students achieve a passing grade in core GCSE’s. The GCSE’s are awarded to students aged 15 to 16 in the UK. With lower GCSE grades, more kids are unlikely to progress onto further education, and the school is unlikely to receive funding to allow for it’s students to take part in life changing experiences such as iGEM.
We believe that synthetic biology has the potential to solve some of the world's most pressing problems. However, synthetic biology is a complex and rapidly developing field, and that it can be difficult for people to learn about it on their own. That's why we are committed to making synthetic biology more accessible to everyone. We designed workshops that are a great way for students to learn about synthetic biology and iGEM, in a fun and interactive way.
This year, we aimed to visit local underprivileged schools in and around Coventry and London, to teach students about synthetic biology and iGEM. Our workshops are designed to be engaging and informative, including the basics of synthetic biology, its potential applications, with an emphasis on ethical implications of the field.
In addition to teaching students about synthetic biology, we also designed a Q&A session with the students to answer any questions regarding pursuing a degree or careers in science. Our diverse backgrounds, stories of how we ended up together , or our varied interests would hopefully allow us to break down preconceptions that iGEM was limited to a specific type of person. The key message of our workshop was to show the students we met that it is important to aim high, and that it's possible to achieve those aspirations, regardless of their background or circumstances.
Reflections
Having successfully received confirmations from Barr’s Hill School Coventry, Draper’s Academy, Brampton Manor Academy and Hedingham School, we were able to deliver in all schools apart from Brampton Manor Academy, which we aim to deliver at after the jamboree. Every school was a unique experience but the feedback throughout the workshops culminated in a few broad insights. Firstly, synthetic biology was a topic that most of the students were unfamiliar with and had not considered careers in the field. This was something that we explicitly targeted in our activities and Q&A sessions, and hopefully changed some minds about. Secondly, most students doubted that they could effectively engage with synthetic biology concepts as they seemed arcane. It was key for us to show them that content they had already learned in their syllabus was applicable to basic synthetic biology concepts and that it wasn’t something abstruse or out of their reach. Overall, especially with successful Q&A sessions that broke down myths about university teaching and accessibility, I think we met our goals but it was difficult to gauge as our workshops were one-offs. A series of workshops, working closely with a school would be more effective at delivering our messages and driving home our values, by working closely with the kids that need this message the most.
Communicating with our community
A change we found made a large impact was to our outreach and communication efforts. Specifically making sure all of our video form content such as our TikToks (@igem_warwick), Instagram posts and workshop videos all had subtitles. This was sadly not something we could add to our promo video as it was unavailable in the format that iGEM required but this is something we hope iGEM HQ will address for future years.
The key to all of our changes was to make sure that, wherever possible, we made those small changes that enfranchised people who normally would find it difficult to access our deliverables. This came in the form of making sure our annotations on results such as gels were available in colours such as blue, to be accessible to people with red-black color blindness. Further, we made sure to use simple colours and text throughout our wiki and annotations.
For future iGEM teams, something we hoped to do was to make our wiki and videos available in different languages. With the advent of easily accessible AI tools, as a team we felt that these tools could help our research find audiences outside of the English-speaking world. Our main block here was time constraints and lack of access to these tools as API’s to work natively on our wiki. We’re confident however, that as this emerging field of AI web-apps develops, we can make sure iGEM becomes a model of inclusivity to aspire to in the synthetic biology field.
Tor's Journey to iGEM
This year Warwick iGem welcomed Tor who is a neurodiverse LGBT+ student with an assistance dog to the team. Since her involvement she has shared her work with the team on challenging the misconceptions about the lived experiences of disabled students. She has primarily worked with the university to educate staff and students about assistance dogs and has shared her case study on this page which resonates with her own experiences as a STEM student working in a lab who also requires disability support and reasonable adjustments. Tor’s work on this project alongside iGem and her vast achievements throughout her degree earned her a nomination for a WIHEA fellowship in which she was successful. Tor has used her story to inspire students when visiting schools and sixth forms that may not have otherwise considered a future in science.