High School Education

Last year, the 2013 VGEM team reached out to Renaissance School and offered to teach a class on synthetic biology and the iGEM experience. Renaissance accepted, and the VGEM team visited the school once a week for six weeks during the fall. This pilot class has now become a regularly offered course at Renaissance School, and students taught by the 2014 VGEM competed at the 2014 High School iGEM competition. The work of the 2013 team inspired this year’s team to continue and expand their collaborative efforts with schools in the community. Renaissance School: A Continued Collaboration The What Can Synthetic Biology Do For You? Competition To get high school students thinking about synthetic biology (and possible iGEM projects), we proposed the question “What Can Synthetic Biology Do For You?” to students and asked them to submit a poster outlining their synthetic biology solution. We asked teachers at the local high schools to publicize our competition, and the students at Renaissance High School took the competition by storm. Eight students submitted posters with ideas ranging from engineering bacteria to produce oxytocin to creating parasitized crickets to improve benthos environments. We stopped by the school to award prizes to three of the projects; first prize was $400, second prize was $100 and the honorable mention was given an Amazon gift card. Advising a New Team After presenting students with prizes, we discussed their team’s previous iGEM project. The Math, Engineering and Science Academy (MESA) at Albemarle High School: A New Partnership Teaching at MESA This year, we began the summer by reaching out to specialized science programs at public high schools in Albemarle County. We met with Jeff Prillaman, the director of the MESA program, to discuss teaching a synthetic biology crash course similar to our predecessors with his students. He accepted our offer, and we spent the summer preparing a three-day synthetic biology crash course to be presented to two groups of students in the program. Members of our team taught the synthetic biology course over the week of September 8th. The first class consisted of a general overview of basic molecular biology and an introduction to the field of synthetic biology; this curriculum was taught to both juniors (60) and seniors (40) in the MESA program. The second class was lab-themed; seniors completed a restriction enzyme digest worksheet, loaded, ran and visualized a gel and transformed and plated bacteria containing RFP plasmids. The third class was split into two mini-lectures on the modeling used in synthetic biology and a discussion of the ethics involved in synthetic biology research. The students were given pre and post-assessments for this crash course. The Results