Workshops and events in different languages

As a part of our work on language inclusivity, we held all of our scientific workshops in three different languages - English, Estonian and Russian. The aim of the scientific workshops that we organized in different cities of Estonia was to engage as many people as possible in our project and educate the general public about synthetic biology. Also, our international iGEM team translated descriptions of experiments we offered during workshops into up to 13 different languages so that our workshop visitors could engage with science in the language they prefer. Apart from English, Estonian and Russian, workshop protocols were also available in Latvian, Ukrainian, Slovak, Turkish, Azerbaijani, Belarusian, Spanish, Polish, Georgian and French. Depending on the location of our workshop, we took with us the necessary translations. For example, when organizing scientific workshops in Narva - the city where the vast majority of the population are ethnic Russians - we mainly took experiment descriptions in Russian. However, we took with us all translations when holding a workshop in Tartu, since Tartu is known to be a city with a lot of international students.

Also, we used trilingualism (Estonian, English and Russian) when advertising our other activities and events, such as Scientific Art Exhibition and Escape Room event. Posters for this event were also available in Estonian, English and Russian.

We find that putting an effort into language inclusivity at our public engagement events is especially important, because it enables young people, who are not fluent in multiple languages, to understand and participate in our events. Creating an interest in science in young people is critical in establishing the next generation of synthetic biology researchers.

Video subtitles in different languages

To reach out to a broader audience with our project, we translated the subtitles of our project PROMOTION VIDEO into 12 different languages in addition to English. Our subtitles were presented in Estonian, Ukrainian, Turkish, Spanish, Slovak, Russian, Polish, Latvian, Georgian, French, Belarusian and Azerbaijani.

We also translated the video about our Scientific Art Exhibition and Escape Room event into 8 different languages: Estonian, Latvian, Georgian, Russian, Spanish, Turkish, Ukrainian, Polish. The video with subtitles can be watched here

Wiki homepage in different languages

Our international Estonia_TUIT iGEM team also decided to make as many translations as possible for our project’s wiki page. Text on our wiki homepage is available in 13 different languages: English, Estonian, Russian, Latvian, Ukrainian, Slovak, Turkish, Azerbaijani, Belarusian, Spanish, Polish, Georgian and French. Visitors of our wiki page can choose among those languages the one in which to familiarise themselves with our project.

Web Content Accessibility Guidelines

Since a lot of people get to know about our project from the wiki page, this year we set ourselves a goal to make it clear and accessible for everyone, including people with disabilities. For this purpose, we decided to design our wiki according to WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) which is a single shared standard developed by The Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) in cooperation with organizations around the world providing information on how to make web content accessible. For our wiki page, we decided to meet as many of the WCAG A and AA level requirements as possible.

The ‘A’ level requirements that we have implemented on our wiki page:

• Moving, blinking and scrolling information can be stopped by the user. The user can disable moving animations using the corresponding option in the accessibility toolbar in the top right corner of our website.
• The website doesn’t contain anything that flashes more than three times in one second period.
• Web pages have titles that describe the topic of the corresponding page.
• Color is not used as the only visual means of conveying information.
• Text version of the spoken audio in all videos in the form of subtitles is provided.

‘AA’ level requirements that we have implemented on our wiki page:

• Text of website content can be resized and the website is responsive to different screen sizes.
• High contrast between text and its background is implemented on every page of the website.
• Website has consistent navigation and identification.
• No timing is implemented on the website.

Additionally, we designed a special accessibility toolbar for our wiki page that can be found on the top right corner and have multiple options to make content on the website more accessible. There are multiple functionalities available in the toolbar:

• The user can enable an option to convert text to speech. If this option is enabled, then the selected text will be converted to speech.
• The user can stop all animations on the website. This functionality is important for people with cognitive disabilities that affect attention and focus.
• The user can enable the functionality to make the website accessible for dyslexic individuals. It converts all web page content to a dyslexia-friendly font called Comic Sans with letters appearing less crowded which enhances the ease of content reading and comprehension.
•The user can adjust the font size by making it bigger or smaller. This functionality might be useful for people with visual impairment.

Accessibility toolbar instructions

We created instructions for our accessibility toolbar that clearly explain how to use all of its functionalities.

Inclusivity survey “SEN students in STEM”

Inclusive education has been a leading principle for the management of education in Estonia since the Basic Schools and Upper-Secondary Schools Act was approved in 2010. Based on the principle of inclusive education, students with special educational needs (SEN) usually study at a regular school with other pupils of their age. Despite all progress that has been achieved in the field of the application of inclusive education in Estonia, there is still a large room for improvement. According to research on inclusive education in Estonia, academic achievement is becoming more difficult for learners with SEN at higher levels of the education system. Some of the main problems SEN students face are teachers’ insufficient expertise and limited time resources (Research on Inclusive Education in Estonia, 2017).

Our Estonia_TUIT team decided to spread awareness about the challenges SEN students might encounter while pursuing their education in the STEM field and find ways to make STEM more accessible and welcoming for SEN students. To reach this goal, we carried out a survey “SEN students in STEM” in a collaboration with the iGEM team Riga-Latvia. The survey is available in English, Estonian and Latvian and it can be accessed via the following links:

• survey in English

• survey in Estonian

• survey in Latvian

The survey focuses on understanding the challenges of SEN students studying STEM, identifying the main barriers of inclusive education and listening to the respondents’ suggestions on how to improve the general accessibility of STEM. To reach a broader audience and raise general awareness about the topic, we made a separate section “inclusive education” in our survey that is also for non-SEN students.

To ensure that we included ethically sound and relevant questions as well as to seek advice on our survey, we reached out to iGEM Diversity & Inclusion Committee. We got valuable feedback from the committee members as well as from a former committee member and iGEM judge Rohan Sunil Dandavate. Recommendations that we received enabled us to improve the survey in various ways. Regarding the most important improvements, we added the questions for non-SEN students thanks to the feedback of the committee. Also, we looked into research and statistics on the inclusion of SEN students in Estonia and Latvia and integrated this data into the survey by making closed-ended questions based on it. This enabled us to compare the responses that we received from Estonian and Latvian students with the broader published statistics in both countries.

It was a pleasure to receive approving words from committee members regarding our survey:

Our team distributed the “SEN students in STEM” survey among the students of the University of Tartu. In order to reach out specifically to SEN students, we contacted the Special Needs Advisors of the University of Tartu who gladly supported our initiative and sent the survey to SEN students they were working with. Also, our team reached out to the SENsationalSTEM project and distributed it among the participants. SENsationalSTEM is an EU project that aims to help activate students with special educational needs through science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) based entrepreneurship. Schools from Finland, Estonia and Latvia participate in the SENsationalSTEM project.

Interview with Meelis Joost - SENsationalSTEM project manager and representative of the Estonian Chamber Of Disabled People

Our team had an interview with Meelis Joost - SENsationalSTEM project manager and representative of the Estonian Chamber of Disabled People. We discussed some of the problems that students with special educational needs face when pursuing the field of STEM both in Estonia and internationally and the ways to find meaningful solutions for these problems. Also, we got valuable ideas regarding the work our team is doing on inclusivity in the project.

time-consuming and might make comprehension of scientific information more complicated for students. Our team decided to check if there are scientific terms on our wiki page that don’t have an accurate sign in American Sign Language (ASL) and Estonian Sign Language (EVK). It turned out that there are many more terms that don’t have a sign in Estonian Sign language than in American Sign Language. We prepared a list of the most commonly used synthetic biology words that don’t have a sign in Estonian Sign Language (EVK) and discussed with Meelis Joost the possibilities of creating conceptual signs for them in Estonian Sign Language (EVK). We’re planning to continue this work in future iGEM seasons.

We summarized possible solutions for issues discussed during the interview together with suggestions we got from our survey “SEN students in STEM”. We’re inviting everyone to consider those suggestions to make science more accessible for people with disabilities. We are also planning to convey those suggestions to Special Educational Needs Advisors at the University of Tartu.

Results of the survey

Overall, we received responses from 15 people, 7 of whom are students with special educational needs. Most potential participants to whom we reached out are geographically limited to 2 countries- Estonia and Latvia and pursue their education, particularly in STEM. Considering the fact that both SEN and non-SEN students who participated in our survey do not constitute a representative sample, we cannot make reliable conclusions based on the data we received. We are still working on reaching out to more SEN students by contacting local educational institutions and non-profit organizations.

However, we did obtain some valuable ideas and suggestions from the data we gathered.

All students participating in our survey are studying in the general education classroom, 13 of them studying for higher education level and 2 of them for secondary education level.

Section “Inclusive education” for both SEN and non-SEN students

With regards to the survey section “inclusive education” which was developed for both SEN and non-SEN students, most of the respondents assessed the level of integration and inclusion of SEN students in their educational institution to be 5 or less based on a scale of 1-10, and all students think that it is important for their educational institution to focus on addressing the problems SEN students might have. This indicates that there are still significant accessibility issues for SEN students to be addressed in most educational institutions.

According to the answers of our respondents, the main barriers to inclusive education are:

• Lack of assistants and teachers for SEN students.
• Teacher's expertise: teachers lack the necessary training and advice to work with SEN students.
• Teacher's limited time resources: teachers do not have enough time for the necessary help, support and instructions SEN students may need.

It is interesting to note that our results are consistent with the official report on the assessment of inclusive education in Estonia from 2016, which states that the main problems for inclusive educational organization are teachers’ limited time resources and insufficient expertise to work with SEN students. These problems could be solved by the government and educational institutions by providing extra courses and training for teachers to work with SEN students and by increasing salaries for those teachers. Also, the fact that there are not enough teachers for SEN students might be closely linked to the fact that teachers working with SEN students have limited time resources for their work.

In the section “inclusive education”, we also asked what kind of support SEN students receive in the educational institutions of our respondents. The most commonly mentioned ways of support were psychological counseling, directed help and counseling provided by assistants and special needs advisors, additional classes and consultations, flexible deadlines and personalized educational materials.

Section “Your story in STEM” for SEN students

Another section “Your story in STEM” was developed just for those participants who identify themselves as students with special educational needs.

To analyze results more efficiently, we included the question “What type of special need do you have? (for example, intellectual, motor, visual, etc.)”. Students with visual impairment, hearing impairment, autism, ADHD, mental illness, as well as intellectual and physical disabilities participated in our survey.

We asked participants about the main challenges they have faced during their engagement in the STEM field, what has helped them to overcome those challenges and what kind of support they think would be helpful for them to be more included in the STEM classes.

Summary of suggestions to improve the general accessibility of the STEM field

In the last section of our survey, all participants were asked to share some suggestions to improve the general accessibility of the STEM field for SEN students.

Our team summarized suggestions that we got from respondents as well as the ones we came up with after our interview with Meelis Joost. We invite everyone to work together to facilitate inclusivity driven by these aspects.

• It is incredibly important to create an atmosphere of acceptance in every inclusive educational institution so that students with special educational needs feel safe and welcome. This can be achieved by the common effort of all students and teaching staff. Do not hesitate to offer help or communicate the problem if you notice that someone is struggling. Not all disabilities and special needs are visible at first glance, so we invite everyone to be kinder and more tolerant towards all students.

• If as a SEN student you need some help or support, do not be afraid to reach out to your school authorities, teachers and your peers.

• We invite speakers to provide a text version of their speeches and presentations they have during events, conferences, meetups, etc. for people with hearing and vision impairment.

• If you are a lecturer, make sure you describe with words the graphs, figures and drawings you include on your slides for students with visual impairment. Such students often struggle to fully understand the information conveyed if some important part of your narrative is on some hard-to-see visual material and you don’t explain it properly.

• For educational institutions it is important to educate both staff and students about various disabilities. It can be organized in the form of short workshops, courses, seminars for teachers, and discussions during lessons for students. Also, in our survey, we got a suggestion from a SEN student to create educational materials which would explain the most important things about various disabilities in a simple language, so that teachers would know some details and offer help without having to invest a lot of time in training.

• If you are a teacher, make sure you know about all SEN students in your class, and encourage students to ask you for any help or support that is needed.

• Many of our respondents pointed out the importance of psychological counseling and counseling by special needs advisors for SEN students. Thus, we advise educational institutions to provide easily accessible counseling services for all SEN students.

• Inclusive educational institutions need to provide equal opportunity to both non-SEN and SEN students to participate in different co-curricular activities and interest clubs.

• When organizing any event such as a seminar or workshop, make sure that it is easily accessible for SEN students. For example, when registering for the event, participants can have an option to mark whether they have some special needs. Based on that, organizers should provide the necessary facilities, equipment and support to SEN students registered for the event. If it is possible, the solution to making some events accessible could be conducting them in a hybrid format (both online and offline). For any event in an inclusive educational institution, we invite organizers to assign at least one person to be responsible for making the event accessible and finding ways to provide necessary help for SEN students.

• Based on the suggestions of our respondents, not all inclusive educational institutions have enough SEN-friendly facilities and equipment. Apart from the general facilities for SEN students, like automatic doors, elevators and accessible toilets, we invite educational institutions to make lab equipment and other STEM equipment accessible for SEN students involved in scientific research. Some adjustments that might be introduced are machines operated by voice command, adjustable height of equipment and instruments according to individual’s needs, and incorporation of Braille code in lab instruments.

Our team invites local authorities, staff of educational institutions, non-profit organizations, SEN students and their peers to work together to make the STEM field more accessible, open and welcoming for everyone. Understanding the challenges faced by SEN students and barriers to inclusive education, listening to suggestions, and communicating the problems is crucial for making the STEM field and scientific community more inclusive. With the help of the “SEN students in STEM” survey, we spread awareness about the topic, and the information obtained from the survey helped us to come up with impactful solutions that can be implemented to facilitate inclusivity.

Our team was happy to receive positive feedback about the survey from our participants:

Future prospects

From the data obtained in the survey, we also got some very particular suggestions and comments to consider. Some of those were:

• lack of automatic doors in most of our university buildings
• not enough educational materials about autism in the Estonian language
• problems with the availability of Estonian subtitles for many educational videos

After our team obtains more answers to the survey, we are planning to cooperate with Special Needs Advisors of the University of Tartu by sharing some suggestions and types of additional support SEN students in our university might need based on what we learned from the survey.

We are planning to continue our campaign on interviewing both SEN and non-SEN students after this year’s iGEM season officially finishes. Thus, we are continuing to collect responses and every student is welcome to fill in the survey. Our team would be happy if you could share the survey with people who identify themselves as students with special educational needs.

Depending on students' responses we would like to try to do some additional work, for example, make our educational events more accessible to SEN students or raise some problems with STEM accessibility in the Baltics on a higher level.

We believe that our iGEM team can find some impactful solutions to make the STEM field more accessible for everyone.

Age inclusion in our workshops

Our scientific workshops organized in different cities of Estonia are welcoming and accessible for people of all age groups. During the workshops, we explain and show basic principles and phenomena of biology in an easy and understandable language both for young and elderly audiences. The opportunity to do scientific experiments on your own is interesting for everyone!

Comic book for children

We participated in a collaboration launched by the Tec Chihuahua iGEM team from Mexico with the aim to create a comic book for children about our iGEM project. The two pages long colouring book explains the goal of our Space Yeast project in simple words and in a straightforward way. We distributed this comic book in multiple workshops and also translated it into the Ukrainian language for the Science day event organized for refugee children from Ukraine.

Lectures and info sessions

Our team organizes various lectures and info sessions to advertise our BSc Science and Technology program as well as the iGEM competition

It is the 6th time our team Estonia_TUIT has taken part in the annual festival "Researchers’ Night (Teadlaste öö festival)". Both elderly and younger people came to the event, and many guests were together with their families. Our team held a mini-lecture about iGEM competition, our this year’s iGEM project and synthetic biology for the guests of the event. Also, we offered our guests three workshops: DNA extraction from kiwi, pigment extraction from dill and traffic lights. The workshops were available in four different languages: Estonian, English, Ukrainian, and Russian.

When participating in various educational fairs and organizing info sessions about our BSc Science and Technology program, we always introduce iGEM competition to our visitors and present our iGEM team and projects. We explain our projects, iGEM competition and synthetic biology terms in an easy and understandable language for various age groups from preschool-aged children to elderly people. This year we went with info sessions to the educational fair SKOLA in Riga, Latvia, as well as to events and fairs in Baku, Azerbaijan and Tbilisi, Georgia.

Art exhibition and Escape room event

On September 27th, our Estonia_TUIT iGEM team organized a Scientific Art exhibition and Escape room event in Tartu. During the event, our guests could learn more about biology while participating in 5 different scientific workshops and take a look at our scientific art exhibition with pictures from fellow students working in different research labs. Everyone could test their knowledge about science and synthetic biology as well as win our special gift bags while participating in interactive Kahoot! quizzes. Also, we presented our iGEM project to guests and answered all their questions. One of the most exciting parts of the event was the escape room which had a theme of our Space Yeast project.

Many people came to our event together with younger and older generations of their families. It was a great opportunity for both children and elderly people to get to know about iGEM and synthetic biology while engaging in various fun activities.

Info sessions in Estonia and other countries

This iGEM season members of our Estonia_TUIT team together with our team's secondary PI, Dr. Ilona Faustova, went with info sessions to two third-world countries - Georgia and Azerbaijan. During our info sessions on educational fairs in those countries, we introduced young people to our international BSc Science and Technology program at the University of Tartu, iGEM competition and our iGEM project. Also, we spread knowledge about synthetic biology and did our best to spark an interest about this field in young people of Azerbaijan and Georgia.

With those info sessions our team reached out to Georgian and Azeri students about the possibilities of synthetic biology and presented them a chance to learn about the opportunity to pursue their education in this field at the University of Tartu.

Summer school “Synthetic Biology and its Applications”

This summer our team organized an international summer school “Synthetic Biology and its Applications” at the University of Tartu during 1-9 August 2022. The summer course's objective was to give an overview of recent developments in synthetic biology and its uses. The attending students also had a chance to visit our research facilities in Tartu and gain practical experience in molecular cloning and genetic engineering. Estonia_TUIT iGEM team made week-long wet lab sessions with the final goal of making genetically engineered yeasts that produce carotenes which can be used in different applications. Students were able to learn the basics of synthetic biology and how it can be used to benefit society by decreasing production costs and having a better environmental impact than conventional production methods. Our iGEM team tries to include people from different areas and by organizing this summer school we wanted to give them an opportunity to work in the lab and try out synthetic biology, specifically for students who do not have this opportunity in their home countries.

SMTB

In 2022, we had the honor to host the School of Molecular and Theoretical Biology in the Institute of Technology. This school is an annual intense summer program. Around 90 students from 36 countries across the world came to our institute.

We believe that a welcoming and encouraging environment improves students' ability to learn, hence, our iGEM team tried to help the visiting high school students to quickly adapt to our research facilities.

JOGL

To make science more accessible, we are sharing our workshop protocols with Safer Open Protocols for biology (SOPbio) in Just One Giant Lab (JOGL). SOPbio is a community effort to provide protocols that integrate components of understanding of the hazards connected with biosafety and biosecurity to improve biology. This initiative tries to establish a community that shares safe biotech practices. Since in our workshop we do not use microorganisms and hazardous chemicals, we gladly decided to share them beyond iGEM to provide other people with possibilities to try out some simple, but fun science experiments.

Inclusivity webinar

On the 14th of August 2022 our team participated in the Inclusivity Webinar organized by the Korea_HS iGEM team. During the event, each team presented their project on inclusivity and shared their plans for contributing to a shared goal of a diverse and inclusive scientific community.

Our team received valuable feedback about our work on inclusivity that helped us with the creation of our “SEN students in STEM survey”. During the webinar, together with other teams, we came up with some ideas for questions that address non-SEN students and assess the level of inclusive education. We were interested to learn about the inclusivity projects of other teams and were happy to get inspired by them.

Science day event for refugee children from Ukraine

With the aim to educate refugee children about the topics of science and synthetic biology, our Estonia_TUIT team organized a Science day event which was held on September 10th 2022 for school-aged Ukrainian children. We organized it together with Ukraina Maja - the Ukrainian community in Tartu. All activities during the event were held in the Ukrainian language thanks to our Ukrainian-speaking teammates, so the children had an opportunity to learn about science in their native language. During the event, we educated children about important topics related to science, introduced the field of synthetic biology and familiarize them with our iGEM project in a playful and interactive way. Together with our young guests, we performed fascinating science experiments, for example, DNA extraction from kiwi, traffic light experiment, pigment extraction and chromatography flowers experiment. Also, the children coloured a comic book about our Space Yeast iGEM project that we made in a collaboration with the Tec Chihuahua iGEM team from Mexico.