"
Team:Carnegie Mellon/BeyondtheBenchmark
From 2014.igem.org
This summer, the Carnegie Mellon iGEM Team was determined to go beyond the bench[mark] for students and teachers around the greater Pittsburgh area. In the autumn season, our area of outreach extended to different cities across the United States and to an orphanage in Santa Cruz, Bolivia.
For policies & practices this summer, our question became:
How can we engage, educate, and excite middle and high school students on the concepts of synthetic biology?
In reading “scientific literacy is primarily a concept about curriculum goals,” the CMU iGEM outreach team decided to approach engagement, education, and excitement on synthetic biology for a middle and high school age level through gamified classroom kits and labs that are available for teachers to borrow through the classroom kit lending library from DNAZone, an outreach center from CMU.
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 a 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.
