Team:Melbourne/Human Practices

From 2014.igem.org

Education

For kindergarten students 2 references

Children’s book We decided to target very young children because we think it's important to teach children at an early age ~4-6 about science as this is the time when their key learning happens and it could be used as a foundation (good to get a journal article reference in here about that - I'm sure there are heaps!). In addition, there are lots of resources about science for older kids but not so many for kids at such a young age.

Insert video from Ranit

http://www.amazon.com/Adventures-E-Coli-Biann…/…/ref=sr_1_1…

For adults 2 references

http://www.scienceweek.net.au/market-of-the-mind/ http://re-science.org.au/science-event/market-mind-2649

Video from Market of the Mind Robyn at 0:45 seconds giving the true/false quiz http://youtu.be/ahFI3aFBdNc

Market of the mind Wearing t-shirts Insert photos from event Insert location map (gmaps or just image) NSW Victorian Chair of National Science Week

Insert NSW booth pamphlet

At Highly visible Great location next to the bar, which ensured high traffic through our booth True or False quiz with a chocolate for reward

For university students 2 references

Burgeoning new website aimed at the full spectrum of students from high school, to university to recent graduated

Strange Nature video http://youtu.be/ZuSoO3HVMjo?list=UUUHXKyGSgRnbYe3zpbLHRng

Blogging

Lecture bashed a lot of IT students during recruitment

For high school students

2 references

Attended Nobel Laureate Peter Doherty’s presentation to Scotch College and promoted iGEM after the presentation

My idea is to get an interested, well resourced, private high school (e.g. Lauriston, MGS, Scotch) to partner with an iGEM team (e.g. UoM) to field a team of half private high school students/half underrepresented students – who would have their flights to Boston funded by fundraising done primarily by the private high school.

Strange Nature Writing competition – on flyer at NSW

At the moment, my team is concurrently working on a variety of project elements, including both wetlab and P&P. We haven't decided yet whether we would like to enter the P&P stream, however I feel that our team's P&P project concept is very solid.

What we want to do is; a) improve iGEM's accessibility to those of disadvantaged backgrounds, b) increase female representation in science & iGEM and c) increase the participation of Australian/international high school students in the iGEM competition. To accomplish these three goals, we intend to work with a private Australian girls high school that has the sufficient resources to source funding for a high school team consisting of half underprivileged students from across Victoria, Australia, & half privileged students from their own institution. The team would be managed by our undergraduate team, working with the high school team as advisers and providers of wetlab access. We aim for the high school team to enter the competition in 2015 and will devote part of our time and resources to best ensure it is organised by 2015.

More broadly, we hope that we can convert our experiences in founding a high school team into a guide for undergraduate teams around the world to organise their own high school teams, in partnership with well resourced high school institutions in their own countries. Based on preliminary talks with stakeholders related to the education sector, we feel this is achievable and are aware that it may take some time (1-2 years) to become fully realised. Nonetheless, our undergraduate team is committed to ensuring that our universities' subsequent teams, pick up the gauntlet so to speak.

We would appreciate it if Policies & Practices could assist us by providing pointers to previous iGEM teams that have some overlap with our P&P project. As a science communication student myself and the leader of the P&P element of our team's project - I would appreciate any literature that P&P feel I should know about before further embarking on this project.

Thanks for your kind note Peter. As you say, Scotch is now fully across iGem - and I think other schools similarly would welcome hearing about it.

Making a significant investment in science facility

Future teams approaching – Collaborative exercise

High School Team plans We wanted to get exposure and give exposure education and experience

IP (get Sean to write) 2 references

(Melbourne Innovation Department + team members who've had some experience with IP + Oxford NDA process to protect IP + personal research)

For the question, we thought it could be something about education. Maybe something to the effect of "how can we educate children at a young age about science and synthetic biology?" Or "are kids getting enough science education". Might we could throw in a few references to an education journal about science education (as that can be an expert consulted; other teams seem to have refs on their pages) Also, we were thinking we can quote Ranit's mum, who owns the childcare centre (she's happy for us to say whatever).

Can you get in touch with Peter to work on the outreach page? I think our plan was to have a theme of education as our outreach. So communicating on three levels - adult (market of the mind), high school (the high school team), and younger children (children's book).

Sean told me that you were doing the public outreach page and I just want to tell you a few things about the children's book.

You can get the pdf version of it on our fb page and in the start there's a part about our aims. If you have a read of that, that could give you a clear summary. Tomorrow we are going in to a childcare centre and spending the day with kids aged ~3-5 teaching them about science, having a book reading and playing science-related games. I think this is a great public outreach avenue and I think you should really emphasise how good it is because were not just going in and giving a speech to older kids/students etc. (which isn't that new of a concept), we're actually going in interacting with these kids and helping them to form a scientific/biological foundation. This really doesn't happen (my parents own childcare centres and they told me haha). Even though we'd be going to one childcare centre, we can claim that we went to 3 as my parents own 3 childcare centres and theyr'e really chilled about helping us out. Also, the camera guys in our team will be making a video about this which we will put on our website.. so there will actually be proof of it!

Peter. Should include all of our activities, including, children’s book, high school team plans, and any blogging that we’ve done.

Also, it’s been brought to my attention by George Cao that Gayle has been blogging about us on the science communication subject website!:

‘Highlights’ (excerpts) from articles 8 articles written about iGEM Comet.is Science Communication Website

https://comet.is/article/2960 https://comet.is/article/3499/ https://comet.is/article/3381/ https://comet.is/article/3561/ https://comet.is/article/3562/ https://comet.is/article/3694/ http://blogs.unimelb.edu.au/…/igem-a-small-word-for-a-life…/ http://blogs.unimelb.edu.au/…/igem-a-small-word-for-a-life…/