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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. For its first year, two questions were posed and answered by the Carnegie Mellon iGEM team for starting up this initiative.
1. How can we engage, educate, and excite middle students on the concepts of synthetic biology?
2. How can we engage, educate, and excite high school students on the concepts of endocrine disruptors?
Two of the kits were specifically designed with iGEM and our project in mind: Creature Feature and the NetLogo Environmental Simulation.Creature Feature was an “iGEM original” classroom kit that combined concepts of genetics and evolution to meet the curriculum standards, but with an additional synthetic biology twist so as to go beyond the benchmark. A synthetic biology modeling lab, it engages students into the hands-on construction of “creatures” according to a genomic sequence, educates on the principles of synthetic biology, evolution, and genetics, and excites them with candy “features” and an engineering challenge.
The NetLogo Environmental Simulation helped the iGEM team visually represent the effects of minute concentrations of estrogen in a body of water when there is a food chain of algae, fish, and eagles involved. The employment of this model in a classroom setting engages students into the visualization of a population crash dependent on the variables, educates them about ecological systems, food chains, and endocrine disruptors, and excites them with the user’s choice around the parameters, offering a different outcome every time.
To evaluate our approaches to synthetic biology modeling labs and environmental simulations, we would ask a series of questions at the end of each session to reflect what worked best, what didn’t, and what needs to be available or changed for next time. The evolution of Creature Feature itself was extensive and involved input from over 30 science teachers and beta-testing with over 60 students, but resulted in a ready-made classroom kit that will be officially available for lending in January 2015 and available online in December 2014.
[MORE ON EVALUATION PIECE]More than the classroom kits, the CMU iGEM Team delved into the controversial world of policies & politics, ethics & impacts of endocrine disruptors to further our knowledge base and raise awareness.
