Education

Family Day

Every February, the University of Lethbridge hosts a fun Family Day event. The purpose of this day was to introduce the community to the university in a fun and engaging way. Our team took part in organising a few of the STEM activities. These activities included learning how to pipette by mixing coloured water in test tubes, playing with molecule sets to learn about the structures of the world in an easily digestible fashion, and colouring images of germs to teach the community about the appearances of what can make humans and animals sick. We also showed our iGEM project proposal and explained our project to many of the interested families visiting our station. These activities that we organised allowed families and kids to have fun while learning about science and our project.

Summer Camp

For part of our education goals, we decided to partner with Destination Exploration, a youth STEM outreach program at the University of Lethbridge, and organise multiple activity days with the summer camps. The focus of these experiences was to teach the kids how engaging and enjoyable the lab can be. We chose the activities to be attention-grabbing and fun at the same time. Our team introduced the children to the lab environment, and taught them about pH, acids, bases, and DNA structure through immersive, hands-on activities we developed as a group. The kids seemed to be really interested and it was overall a great experience!

SHAD

This summer we also helped teach a group of high school students about wet lab experiments. The University of Lethbridge has a cohort of SHAD students, and for one of their activities they did a mini-prep with Dr. Laura Keffer-Wilkes. SHAD is a Canada-wide program where students stay at a university for about a month and learn about STEM. As our team has experience doing mini-preps, we decided to help out and taught the SHAD students. The main activity was practising pipetting, so we got to assist the students with the hands-on practice. It was amazing to connect with other students around our grade level interested in STEM. We also were able to teach them about iGEM since some of the students did not know what it was.

Tech Futures Challenge

This year we participated in the Tech Futures Challenge. The Tech Futures Challenge is an online and in-person workshop that is held every year in Calgary in May. This year it was held on May eight and nine. At this time we had two project ideas named: Bo-Find and Levothyroxine. We gave a presentation on each project. While we were there we presented both of our presentations to multiple judges. From their feedback that we received from them we were able to decide on what project would be best to continue with. This was our current Bo-Find project. We were able to use their suggestions and guidance to help adjust our plan moving forward from that point. There is more information about our project pitches at the Tech Futures Challenge on the Human Practices page.

BioTreks

Every year in March and April we spend time to create and publish a BioTreks paper about our project’s background and it’s use in the world. BioTreks is the only international synthetic biology journal that solely publishes peer-reviewed journals written by high school students. This year we wrote about our Bo-Find project, detailing our Safety measures, goals, device, parts, diagnostic techniques for sampling cattle, and much more. From our abstract to our draft to our final article we were able to learn alot about our project and adjust our goals. These adjustments that we made to our project goals were also thanks to the people who reviewed our article before it was published. This opportunity allowed us to publish a paper that the rest of the world will be able to access and read; allowing people from across the globe to learn about our project and our goals. There is more information about our BioTreks paper on the Human Practices page.

Arts Showcase and Fundraiser

In August, we put on an arts showcase to raise money and awareness for our project and to showcase the many skills of some of our members. We included a silent auction, in which we raised over two hundred dollars. We were able to put together a presentation showcasing work on our project so far, and we were able to teach members of the community about our findings. Several of our members performed their talents including, piano, rubix cubing, and much more. This event allowed us to express our team’s other talents and to educate our community about our findings from our project.

Fleetwood Bawden Elemetary School

We went to a local elementary school to teach a grade one class about science. We conducted a DNA extraction with bananas! The students also made DNA helix with twizlers, marshmallows, and toothpicks. The goal of this visit was to instill youth with a passion for science and to inspire them to pursue a science career in the future.

High School Symposium

We collaborated with IEA, KhanLabSchool and iGEM Outaouais in an event that allowed all four teams to practice showcasing their projects. All four teams presented their findings in 15 minute presentations, which was followed by a judging session in which members answered questions from a panel of judges. We were also able to have Emily Hicks from Stanford University speak about her experience with further pursuing an iGEM project as a business. We were able to meet and listen to other teams while also educating other teams about our project. This experience allowed us to receive feedback and aided us in fine tuning our presentation skills.

Chinook Symposium

This September our team participated in the 2024 Chinook Symposium held at the University of Lethbridge. The Chinook Symposium is hosted by the department of Chemistry and Biochemistry from the University of Lethbridge each year. At this our team presented our science poster titled: 'Bo-Find: A Rapid, User-friendly Diagnostic Tool for Bovine Respiratory Diseases.' This poster explains in detail about our advancements in our project, graphs, our lab work and information about our hardware design. We presented our project to three different judges. Each judge asked us questions about our project and gave us feedback. We used and incorporated this feedback to help advance our project. There were also many people from the community, people who were presenting their research, and people who were intrigued by our project that asked further questions. At the symposium we won the “best high school poster” award!

Highway Cleanup

Across Alberta, there is an annual spring highway cleanup. Our team signs up each year and is responsible for cleaning up ten kilometres of one of the rural highways in Southern Alberta. This area of Alberta is agricultural land including cattle operations. Southern Alberta is home to the highest density of confined feeding operations in Canada. The highway cleanup helps our team be visible and contribute to our communities. Being out in rural Southern Alberta also helped us understand the size and complexity of the cattle operations and the proximity these operations have to the environment and human development.

Lethbridge Farmers Market

On September 21, our team set up an educational booth for one of the Lethbridge Farmers market dates. The market is is held every Saturday from June to October, and is run by the United Farmers of Alberta association (UFA) at the Lethbridge Agri-Food Hub and Trade Centre. We set up a booth with the goal to help educate the public about our project. This also included talking to cattle farmers who would be interested in our design. At our booth we had colouring pages, molecule building sets and our scientific poster, which we designed to further educate the community on the parts of our project. The hands on colouring pages and molecule sets allowed all age groups to have hands-on learning about our project.

Girl Guides of Canada

As part of our education and community outreach this year we were invited to the 615th Sparks and Embers Girl Guides Canada unit in Lethbridge. We went to one of their regular Thursday meetings to engage with girls aged five to seven years old. We planned the meeting activities around educating the girls on our project and synthetic biology in an easy to understand and interactive way. We brought colouring pages and played games to incorporate a fun way to learn about our project. We also did a lab experiment on extracting DNA from bananas to allow the girls to see strands of DNA. We finished the session by building edible DNA out of licorice, marshmallows and toothpicks. What made this experience particularly special was the women in STEM focus. Girl Guides encourages girls to dream big, and in demonstrating some of the amazing things girls in iGEM are doing, we contributed positively to the community.