KCIS_Xiugang_Taipei

Education

Through educational workshops, our group concentrated on disseminating its synthetic biology resources to additional students who could visit our labs in person. Many of the students at Kang Chiao International School who expressed interest in synthetic biology thought the subject was too difficult to understand. This problem has made synthetic biology a topic that is rarely discussed in our school. In an effort to address this issue, we hosted numerous instructional sessions on the fundamentals of synthetic biology. By doing this, we intend to offer a bridge between the everyday life of a person who is unfamiliar with genetics and biology and the laboratories of cutting-edge research and synthetic biology.

Through the creation of instructional materials that we and others may utilize, we also concentrated on strategies that we could employ to increase the basic understanding of synthetic biology in our school and the places surrounding us.

Education Workshop

Open workshop

During the process of planning, we first discussed possibilities with the school. Due to the fact that the workshop took place in four periods originally assigned to regular classes, we had to negotiate with the school to develop a plan. We eventually settled on the afternoon periods on Thursday, where students all attend talent classes. After settling on the time and location in which the event will take place, we discussed the content of the lessons, which were completed prior to the meetings with teachers, with our biology teachers, making alterations according to feedback we received from the teachers. Minor alterations were suggested through comments, and major issues were communicated through in-person meetings. Finally, with the completion of the preparation parts, we arranged the seminar through Emails and physical invitations throughout the school.

We wanted to fully utilize the tools we had in our labs to introduce other people to the fundamentals of synthetic biology as students in a school with a great variety of biology-related equipment, some of which cannot be obtained anywhere else in the city. A DIY gel electrophoresis loading procedure was carried out with students from our school who weren't enrolled in the synthetic biology class but were curious about what it may entail in order to reach this goal. Many of the younger pupils learned about synthetic biology and had fun doing it thanks to this experience. It is hoped that the attendees will develop a love for biology as a result of this experience and go on to become iGEM scientists in the future.

Click on the presentation to learn more!

This Kahoot helped deliver content!

Photo Gallery of the Lesson

Junior Synthetic Biology Class Workshop

With the experience from the previous workshop, we again reached out to the school in hopes of conducting a lesson in the same periods, but with the junior Synthetic Biology Class

We used our expertise in cloning to instruct new students in our new Synthetic Biology Class, which began at the beginning of the school year, while we prepared for the competition. We spent our time instructing and assisting the junior students who will make up the next IGEM team for the following year as they investigate the mechanics and practices of cloning. We focused on the fundamentals of bacterial transformation in particular and let them run the experiment. This workshop's objective was to lay a solid foundation for our school's forthcoming IGEM team so that they may more easily navigate the complicated world of synthetic biology and develop ideas for their projects for upcoming iGEM contests.

Presentation used:

Photo Gallery of the Lesson

After we completed the workshops we sent out a survey to the participants to see what we had done that worked well, and where we could improve on the lessons in the future.

KCIS X NYCU

For the workshop that integrated members of the school with no background in synthetic biology, on a scale of 1-5, the majority of students who participated in the workshop were highly satisfied (17 out of 21 students chose 4 or 5). Out of all activities, the gel electrophoresis experiment and bio art activity are the most popular (18 students choose 4 or 5). This reflects how the hands-on experiment opportunities we offered are popular and welcomed by students despite they never heard of synthetic biology and or bio art. Among the 21 participating students, 16 students responded that they never heard of synthetic biology and bio art before, but after this workshop not only have they learned more about the science behind bio art, they enjoyed and are interested in exploring more about synthetic biology. Through their responses, we can know our workshop is successful as we promoted the diverse use and fun application of synthetic biology.

Feedback for the our first educational workshop

For improvements, some students reported that the specific scientific terms make the workshop hard to understand, some reported that they wish there are more group activities instead of individual work. Our team is aware of these recommendations and improved our teaching approach based upon. For example, we received many mediocre to slightly dissatisfied responses in our delivery of the overall iGEM picture. To tackle this problem, we will include overall descriptions of the event itself, which we failed to execute in this workshop.

This feedback was crucial to our preparations for the second workshop, as it showed us where we were to improve in order to provide a better learning experience for the participants. For example, the results showed that the participants were generally less satisfied with the delivery of the overall iGEM picture. This suggested that in our first event, we failed to deliver the details regarding the iGEM competition clearly, which could potentially result in the failure in drawing interest to synthetic biology competitions. With this in mind, we created additional slides in our presentations dedicated to exploring our projects and its relationship with the competition. This ultimately allowed us to achieve much better results in the second workshop, as can be seen below.

KCIS X NYCU

Although the majority of students (10 out of 11) are extremely satisfied with the workshop this time around, the most well-liked activities are iGEM picturing, a lecture on bio art, and a bio art activity for the junior synthetic biology class that just began this academic year (10 students choose 4 or 5). This demonstrates that some people prefer to learn through lectures over fully hands-on visualization. As a result, our workshop's inclusion of both experiments and lectures is effective in offering participants a variety of teaching techniques. All participants agreed that they enjoyed this workshop and would be open to taking similar courses in the future.

Feedback for our second educational workshop

Within the feedback, many students reported that senior student assistants and the visualized theory explanation are helpful. In hopes of maintaining our performance, we will be continuing these teaching mechanisms in future events using a similar format, where we will try to focus on developing our experiment delivery to ensure that most if not all the participants can feel highly satisfied with the delivery of the experiment process. For example, we can discuss with science teachers in Kang Chiao International School to see if there are potential opportunities in which we can implement our knowledge into a teaching process in their classes, providing an alternative to learning a particular biology class section. This way students can learn in an interesting fashion all while providing the teachers with an alternate way of delivering class content.

Lessons for use in our school

7th Grader Lessons

As 7th graders are the youngest group in our school and also one of the only grades that have not yet been exposed to any biological content, we prepared a specially designed presentation that will be less difficult for younger attendees to understand, all while presenting to them the significant issue of obesity in simple words and diagrams. Altogether, this is the best presentation for audiences who have near zero knowledge regarding biology. The slide mainly consists of an introduction to what obesity is, why it is important, The basics in biology, learning about lab equipment, learning about synthetic biology, and learning iGEM experiments.

Click here for 7th grader slide

8th Grader Lessons

Going up one year, we believe that a slight increase in specificity in the content we cover in educational slides will be acceptable for a group of 8th grade students. In this presentation, we arranged the presentation itself in a slightly different manner, allowing us to insert more detailed information when delivering the presentation. The basic information in the presentation, however, still remains the same due to the lack of biological knowledge in the audience.

Click here for 8th grade slide

9th Grader Lessons

With the normal biology classes arranged during ninth grade in Kang Chiao international school, we believe that lessons can once again go up in professionality. This time, we designed the presentation similar to the previous powerpoints, but we arranged for an experiment regarding DNA extraction at the end of the presentation that will allow the students to try out what they have learned in class by themselves.

Click here for 9th grader slides

Also, along with the experiment, we also designed worksheets for the students to allow them to follow along with the lesson while writing notes down to further reinforce their understanding. We also discussed the effectiveness of our worksheets in the process of creating it with middle school teachers, eventually modifying it to become more engaging. We plan to advance further and work towards integrating our educational content into these teachers’ classes in the second semester.

Click here for 9th grader worksheet and lab description

Outreach Lessons

As a general presentation for future online outreach sessions, we created a powerpoint that includes all of the essentials when it comes to stepping into iGEM or synthetic biology in general. The presentation includes an introduction to the safety precautions when in the lab, the essential equipment and their introductions, and finally a simple experiment involving the making of bacterial competent cells. The presentation is linked below.

Click here for Outreach session slide