Education
Education Goals
As students, we recognize that education is undeniably a privilege and is unfortunately not as accessible to other people in our community. Throughout our season, our team recognized four main areas where we would want to improve education within our community: children and students, pome fruit consumers and growers, non-native English speakers, and the general public.
Camp
Overview
This past summer, our team ran two week-long summer camps to educate elementary and middle schoolers in our community. Across those two weeks, we had 50 students. Our curriculum encompassed many advanced science topics, including biology, chemistry, synthetic biology, and forensics, with engaging slides and exciting activities and experiments. Beyond the camp itself, weeks in advance were dedicated to meticulously crafting our curriculum for it to be both educationally enriching and engaging.
More Inclusive Curriculum
This summer, we expanded and made a new curriculum to cater to a younger audience, effectively, extending the age range of our camp, and allowing more students of younger grade levels to learn more about STEM. In past years, our camp was administered for rising 7th to 9th graders, but this past summer was offered to rising 4th to 9th graders. Our team recognized the importance of education for all ages and implemented such change to meet our goals of increasing outreach.
Labs and Activities
At our summer camp, we made sure to include engaging labs and entertaining activities to stimulate students’ curiosity and passion for science. Throughout our week, the labs progressed in difficulty, starting with more simple labs such as extracting DNA from strawberries to more advanced labs such as a demonstration of gel electrophoresis. We also incorporated fun activities that exercised their creativity and fostered a love of learning and excitement in the classroom including slime and making models of cells out of clay.
Analysis
At the beginning and end of our camps, we had the students take a quiz to gauge how much they had learned, with the questions spanning the topics we had learned throughout the week. Overall, our students improved and succeeded in learning the content with our scores averaging 2.52/9 before the camp to the after camp score increasing by 3.56 points.
Textbook
Overview
We wrote an 89-page textbook about plant synthetic biology to provide a thorough, educational resource for understanding a big part of modern synthetic biology. This textbook covers the history; tools, technologies, and techniques; engineering and design; applications; and ethical considerations of plant synthetic biology. Our textbook mostly targets high school and college students. We published our book through Amazon KDP, offering our book at the lowest charge possible to achieve our objectives for the book's outreach to everyone. Find us on Amazon!
Translations
To cater our textbook to as large an audience as possible, we created translations of our book in French, Chinese, Korean, Tamil, and Hindi. Increasing linguistic accessibility of our textbook enhances our goals towards expanding education for non-native English speakers who would find reading advanced science topics like plant synthetic biology in their native languages more comfortable and comprehendible.
CCA Annual STEM Showcase
To promote and educate our school community about our project and iGEM as a whole, we participated in our high school’s annual STEM Showcase. We discussed with and educated students, teachers, and families about our project, increasing awareness of synthetic biology and bringing to light the severity of fire blight among San Diego and the world’s pome fruit trees and industries.
Education Booklet
Inspiration
Upon discussing our project with stakeholders, our team recognized a lack of education in our community about the existence and treatment of fire blight and other prevalent tree diseases, which ultimately led to incorrect handling and spread of plant diseases.
Inspiration and Analysis
To promote this much-needed education in our community, we made a user-friendly booklet about notable tree diseases in our community with information on what trees these diseases affect, how to identify them, and how to treat them. We distributed them at the information booths at local farmer’s markets and discussed the efficacy of our booklet with vendors and farmers at the markets. After we visited the farmer’s markets, we evaluated the extent of our booklet as a successful mode of education for the public.
Visuals
Overview
To further increase education and awareness of synthetic biology and key components of our project in our community, especially among the youth, our HP and SciComm teams made bookmarks to be distributed across different libraries in San Diego. With fun facts and colorful graphics, we hope to make the conversation around synthetic biology and its origins, ethics, and impacts more inviting among children who may have not heard of it before. As well as some bookmarks on fire blight and its impact on pome fruit industries, presented in a simplified and educational visual.
