Team:Carnegie Mellon/BeyondtheBenchmark

From 2014.igem.org

In reading Liner's analysis of "Promoting Scientific Literacy," the first statement starts off as “scientific literacy is primarily a concept about curriculum goals.” Finding science fun and exciting, the CMU iGEM outreach team decided to approach scientific literacy in a school setting as a challenge that needed to be met. There is an inherent need for scientific experiments, labs, or models that go beyond curriculum goals and open up the eyes of a student to the highly engaging, educational, and exciting world that exists out there. This summer, we created the Beyond the Bench[mark] initiative to do just that.

"Beyond the Bench[mark]" is an initiative to create learning tools, such as models, labs, classroom kits, etc. that fully meet the related state standards or "benchmarks" set forth by the board of education. The goal of each tool being to supersede these benchmarks by introducing or including another part dedicated to a subject that is not necessarily found in the standards, but can allow for higher learning engagement since it is built on a solid foundation. In this way, new materials that students may not have heard of or know very little accuracy about may be brought to the table without causing a disruption in the classroom curriculum. As of right now, the Carnegie Mellon iGEM Team was determined to go beyond the bench[mark] for students and teachers around the greater Pittsburgh area with one classroom kit and one stochastic model related to synthetic biology and endocrine disruptors. In the autumn season, our initiative focus extended to different cities across the United States and to an orphanage in Santa Cruz, Bolivia.

A general question for each Beyond the Bench[mark] tool up for candidacy is

How can we engage, educate, and excite middle (and/or) high school students on the concepts of _____________?

Making the question basic and open-ended was our intention to allow other teams or people to create their beyond the bench[mark] tools addressing their particular passion. Evaluation for candidacy goes two ways, the first being on curriculum standards met and those unmet with this particular Beyond the bench[mark] tool and the second being on the levels of engagement (interaction), educational material presented, and excitement (possible out-of-the-box idea or creative challenge). All of these specific aspects that we ask tools to include were based on research on gamified science and past iGEM team human practices projects that were highly successful.

For its first year, two questions were posed and answered by the Carnegie Mellon iGEM team for starting up this initiative.