Overview

We conducted presentations and surveys to raise awareness and determine public understanding of UV radiation's risks. Over the summer, we hosted a camp to educate others and gain fresh insights from the participants. Social media became a key tool in our outreach efforts, where we shared posts and educational content to reach a broader audience.

Simultaneously, we engaged with experts, including professors, researchers, and medical professionals specializing in space medicine and dermatology. Their insights helped refine our approach and ensured that our project aligned with the latest scientific developments in DNA repair and UV radiation protection.

We empathized by gathering feedback from the community, as we live in an area that tends to have a high UV Index, so we can gauge the interest in the sunscreen product we proposed for our project through social media. We also met with an aerospace engineering professor to learn more about existing methods for astronauts to protect themselves from UV radiation in space, which is the main issue we planned to address. We defined the problem through preliminary literature review, learning more about the problem and additional components in the process. We ideated through providing interactive educational opportunities such as our summer camp, where elementary and middle school students learned more in-depth concepts about biology.

We were not able to make it to the prototype or test phases, since we did not make it to the protein expression and UV irradiation experiments in the wet lab portion of our project, but we did gather feedback in the form of our human practices survey.

Community Engagement

Summer Camp

The 2024 RBHS iGEM Summer Camp was the second camp our school iGEM club hosted. This time, our target participants were mainly Middle School kids. During this, our main goal was to raise some money while teaching kids about biology, specifically molecular biology. Due to this, we went over topics such as biomolecules, cells, synthetic biology, and cell division. In particular, we spent a lot of time going over the 4 types of biomolecules. This foundational knowledge is crucial for understanding biology in general and will aid them in their middle school science studies.

A student-created model of C₆H₁₀O₄

The camp lasted for two days and although we spent a good amount of time learning about the material, the camp was also filled with hands-on activities to help children visualize the material. On the first day, the kids participated in a magnet activity where they replicated structures of different molecules using magnets. They also performed a strawberry lab, extracting DNA from strawberries using a special solution. The second day included a gummy worm activity, where the gummy worms were used as chromosomes to recreate each phase of cell division. At the end of day 2, there was a bubble lab where the kids created a solution and tested the strength of the dish soap-based solution.

The camp, despite some bumps, was a success. We were able to raise some money for the club while providing a valuable educational experience for the participants. Additionally, we have the slides we used to discuss the topics covered (molecular biology, DNA, cell division) as well as some lab safety slides, which can be useful resources for future educational events.

Symposium and Space Village

On August 3rd, we met with three other iGEM teams from local San Diego high schools at a public library to present and discuss our projects. The teams were from Canyon Crest Academy, Del Norte High School, Westview High School, and Rancho Bernardo High School. We talked about each component of our projects, from wiki design to education to lab work, as well as the fundamental concepts of our project and the issues that we plan to address. After each team presented, members from other teams were invited to ask questions or give comments on the projects. A range of issues were addressed during the symposium, including problems in agricultural, environmental, and health-related topics.

Bacillus the LactoUVfixer by Simeon Kim and Pukaphol (Volk) Thienpreecha

On August 30th, we also participated in the Space Village Meetup hosted by iGEM. We listened to project overviews of teams from all over the world and presented our own ideas as well.

Social media

Our first post was called Astronaut DNAid. The main aim of this post was to educate the community about our project for iGEM. The post consisted of a short description of the issue we were tackling and our solution. Later we posted our RBHS IGEM 2024 Human practices survey. This was because we needed more data for our survey and decided social media would be an effective outreach method. Ten days later, we posted our "Goals of iGEM". We were setting our goals for iGEM this year and informing social media users about the organization as a whole. Our fourth post was our pictures at SDSU in Dr. Love's lab. We posted this to advertise our club activities. It gives a good example of what we did in the lab during the summer. People can see the post as a reference to know what activities we do in IGEM. Then we posted a lab overview for our team. We posted the process of our lab with brief descriptions for each step. This shows the order of the lab process with images to inform our lab process. Subsequently we posted a short post of Photolyase. We posted the introduction of photolyase in order to let people know what photolyase does and how it is important to complete our lab. Finally, we posted some random facts about a person's DNA. We wrote that our DNA all put together is about twice the diameter of the solar system. We thought this was interesting and educational to post it on our iGEM Instagram.

Social Media by Andrew Tolentino and others