As part of our education and communication program this year, we wanted to pass on our interest, knowledge and passion for synthetic biology, greatly amplified by this year’s iGEM experience, to society. In particular, we wanted to reach children and teenagers, as the young generation is the most curious and the one still the most undecided about their future. Therefore, we wanted to run two workshops in school classes of different age groups, where we wanted to convey the basic principles of DNA and synthetic biology to the pupils.
In order to guarantee that our workshops are designed to fit the level of every age group perfectly, and to find the best combination between practical tasks and theoretical background knowledge, we decided to consult EMBL’s Science Education and Public Engagement office (formerly European Learning Laboratory for the Life Sciences). There, we came into contact with Shweta Gaikwad, an Education Officer, and had three very informative online meetings together, where we received a lot of input concerning pedagogical aspects of planning workshops at schools, as well as some useful materials to integrate into our workshop content.
In our first meeting, we presented both iGEM itself and our own project, and what our initial ideas and drafts on these school workshops were. Shweta pointed out that the most important task was to first get in touch directly with the teachers, as they are the people who will act as a connection between the iGEM team and the class, and they will also want to integrate our workshop as well as possible into their current lessons. When we were asking a few general questions on how to teach younger pupils, an important point she made was that instead of trying to read the atmosphere in the workshop, it is always better to just ask the class, as this is more scientific and will make more adequate responses to the respective situation possible.
In our second meeting, we had already decided both on the target age groups (one workshop at a primary, one at a secondary school,
to reach a diverse range of students) as well as the format of our workshops (centred around an experiment/a practical task, in order to engage and fascinate the pupils more). Therefore, we discussed what kind of practical task would be best fitting,
and how to adequately collect feedback on our workshop.
We came to the conclusion that it is important to keep things simple, as overwhelming a student can be a lot more harmful than a student who already knows a few aspects of the practical task.
But nevertheless, it is also important to always provide an explanation to each step of the experiment, as this is what fascinates students about science just as much as being able to work hands-on.
In terms of possible experiments, Shweta referred us to the TeachingBASE, a collection of science teaching materials from the science education team, where, for our secondary school workshop,
we decided on the famous DNA extraction experiment from a banana with household reagents,
because this experiment is very easy to carry out and almost always yields a clearly visible result (white clouds of DNA in the solution), and DNA is one of the most fundamental aspects of synthetic biology.
(more on this experiment can be found on the information booth page)
A second major topic was collecting feedback, and how this can be done in a most scientific way. The first major aspect we learned is that in order to be able to analyse the questionnaire in depth, a detailed characterisation of the student filling out the form is necessary first, because aspects such as your affiliations to different subjects or hobbies also have a major impact on how you perceive the workshop. If for instance one student hates maths and chemistry and rather likes playing soccer and delving into history, and rates the workshop 3 / 5, it means the workshop had a much greater impact on him:her than if a science all-rounder rates the workshop (merely) 3 / 5. This is why we implemented this aspect in our final questionnaires too and asked the students for further informations regarding themselves in the first few questions.
A second major aspect Shweta pointed out is the differentiation between what the students thought about the content of the workshop, and what kind of impression they got from the workshop overall. Questionnaires should therefore contain both questions in the direction of “What was the most challenging about the task?” or “Did you understand how the experiment works?” as well as questions like “Did you like the experiment?” or “Did it make you more curious about science?”, because just asking for opinions will not generate concrete suggestions of improvement. If somebody didn’t like the workshop but didn’t understand anything either, then the explanations in the workshop can be improved the next time, but if somebody understood each detail and still wasn’t interested at all at the end of the workshop, then the whole underlying concept of it would have to be re-evaluated. Keeping all these points in mind, and orienting ourselves along a survey provided by the science education team, we went on to design a questionnaire which was constructed in such a way that it made excellent subsequent in-depth analysis possible.
In our third interview, we had already tried the experiment in our lab, and it worked great, and we were just about to set up a time plan for the workshops. But nevertheless, we were grateful for having had this third online meeting, as we realised that we would have to first adjust the protocol according to lab material availability and adequate safety measurements for students. Therefore, we amended the protocol slightly and for instance pre-filled the right volume of 96% EtOH directly into small Falcon tubes, and just let the students pour it into the beaker to avoid spillage, instead of letting them measure the 16ml by themselves, because 96% Ethanol is more dangerous than the salt and the washing liquid solution. We also scheduled 5 minutes breaks in between, so the students could have some time for recreation and reflection upon the workshop content.
In conclusion, across these three online sessions with the science education team, we have learned a great amount on how to design, prepare and execute workshops, as well as how to professionally collect feedback from the students, and we were able to successfully implement our newly acquired knowledge and skills into our iGEM school workshops.