As part of our section “giving information” we mainly focused on students to support the ones already interested in STEM but especially to inspire the ones who are not, that synthetic biology is very diverse and can be fun for everyone.
We contacted a teacher of the Gemeinschaftsschule Dielheim and arranged a workshop to do with her students. In Germany there are different types of high schools with different graduation levels. A Gemeinschaftsschule (meaning: community school) however gathers students aiming at different graduation levels, which was very fitting to our goal to be inclusive to everyone. The workshop we prepared was for two 9th grade classes in which most students were about to graduate and were looking out for occupational fields to start their training in.
Our workshop started with a recap in which the students named the components of the cell to get into the topic. We then explained the function and the structure of the DNA using analogies to help the students understand. The understanding of the DNA structure was the basis for the experiment.
Thereafter, we went through the steps of the experiment and then the students were given baskets with the prepared materials and an instruction sheet. The instruction to the experiment was given to us by the EMBL Teaching BASE. With their optimized procedure we designed our own instruction sheet. Since the class had students who have fled from the war in Ukraine, we unceremoniously translated the instructions to English to be inclusive to them as well.
All students succeeded and were able to isolate the banana DNA. After the cleanup we gave the students examples of applications of synthetic biology we might encounter in our daily lives, for example the production of insulin for people with diabetes. At the end of the lesson one of our team members who had done a training as a biological technical assistant prior to enrolling to university gave the students an overview on what different trainings are available in the field of science and which vocational schools in the surrounding area offer these trainings.
Since our Team is always looking for ways to improve themselves we brainstormed these alterations we could make for future workshops. It is better to let the students work more independently. We could make the instruction less precise to give the students space to find out themselves which tools are best to use for measuring different ranges of volumina etc.
At the end of our lesson, we asked the students to fill out an anonymous feedback questionnaire to capture their insights on our workshop.
The results show that the students liked conducting the experiment the most, but that they sometimes also
had difficulties using their fine motor skills. To see whether we inspired new students about synthetic biology,
we compared the ratings of students with a favorite school subject in the field of STEM to those who had chosen other subjects as
their favorite. STEM-interested students were more interested in our workshop and thought it was more relevant to the school curriculum.
But interestingly, more of the non-STEM-interested students answered that our workshop increased their interest in biology and DNA.
These results underline that our mission was successful in inspiring new people of synthetic biology. After our workshop a student even reached out and asked us about internships to get a taste of working in synthetic biology, so we truly made an impact.