Learning a new lab technique can be hard.
For any technique, there are often unwritten rules or unexpected places to slip up which your mentor might forget to mention. Videos are a great way to see how an experiment is done or how a process occurs, and they are widely accessible. By filming a tutorial that covers common mistakes and pitfalls that can occur during experiments, we hope to help people be less afraid to make mistakes in lab!
We filmed videos for three techniques - running gels, minipreps, and PCR - as they are some of the most commonly used lab techniques in biological research, as well as in iGEM. Many undergrads we spoke to expressed hesitancy about asking for help in lab, so we wanted to create a resource with solutions and warnings for where things might go wrong in an experiment.
In order to spread the videos to our audience and open a lane of dialogue, we started a Youtube channel to publish the videos on, and distributed a feedback survey to undergrads at Hopkins. We collected interesting insights about the effectiveness of our videos and what extra details or clarifications to include. This advice will be used to improve future educational videos in this series that are meant for training future Hopkins iGEM members as well as undergrads across the internet.
We collaborated with William and Mary and the East Coast Biocrew on our Youtube channel. William and Mary contributed one video informing iGEMers about chassis selection, and both teams shared the feedback survey amongst a wide audience.
Our survey asked viewers for their preexisting academic background (all of which had worked in a biology lab), asked for their understanding of each video's topic before and after on a scale of 1 to 10, and collected ratings for clarity, level of detail, entertainment, and value to the viewer on a scale of 1 to 5.
Watch all our videos on the Hopkins iGEM Youtube channel, and see the survey results below!
