Education
The quality of intellectual resources and, above all, the quality of training of specialists with higher education, capable of solving the most complex problems in all areas of science, technology and social practice, has come to the fore among the priority national problems in all countries. Thus, improving the quality of education, first of all, higher education, is a key task, and for Kazakhstan it is also the most urgent.
The PISA test is an international assessment that measures the level of education. According to the diagrams below [figure 1], in almost 10 years of participating in PISA, a significant proportion of 15-year-olds in Kazakhstan have not reached the minimum literacy threshold in three key areas of assessment, moreover indicators consistently lag behind OECD countries, according to the authors of the national report based on the 2018 assessment.
These statistics clearly show the low level of education in Kazakhstan, which greatly worried our team. We believe that a capable and intelligent generation is growing in Kazakhstan, but our government is slowly taking steps to improve the quality of education. The task of our team for this year was to spread the research potential among schoolchildren. For this purpose, we organized a number of events aimed at popularizing science and education among young people, met with honored people and held various master classes and lectures.
Summer Camp
This year we were lucky enough to hold the Summer Camp in-person. The purpose of this event was to develop the scientific thinking of students by providing professional orientation in the field of science and technology for high school students in Kazakhstan. 141 students from schools with different languages of instruction, as well as children from socially vulnerable groups and 2 students with visual impairments applied for participation in this event from all over Kazakhstan. 42 students with the best performance and motivation were selected from those applicants into 3 groups with Kazakh, Russian and English languages of instruction.
During the Summer Camp, participants got acquainted with the administration of Nazarbayev University and the iGEM NU_Kazakhstan team, enjoyed the tour of the campus and laboratories, conducted an experiment on DNA extraction from bananas, as well as created installations for the upcoming BioArt Exhibition.
As an outcome of the Summer Camp program we asked children to conclude the laboratory experiments in the lab report and they had successfully completed their task. The laboratory report helped the camp participants to become more familiar with the field of science and taught them to generalize and analyze the work done in the laboratory.
Most importantly, camp participants listened to guest lectures from NU professors and specialists in the field of education, technology, and science like MedSupport, Young Researchers Alliance, Cerebra, Jump2Mars, NURIS, and NU Green Campus. The topics of lectures were dedicated to experimental design, science communication, and choosing a career path: “Introduction”, “Thinking like a Scientist”, “Experimental Design”, “Science communication” and “Choosing Career Path”.
During the closing ceremony, all the participants received certificates of participation. Moreover, the most proactive 9 students, who showed their interest during the lectures and activities were awarded with certificates with 30%, 50%, and 100% discounts for IELTS, SAT, or NUET preparation courses from SmarTest Prep which might give them an opportunity to unleash their potential and achieve their goals.
The best moment of organizing the summer camp was the very sincere and nice feedback from the participants. Children gained experience in the field of communication, science, and creativity, met like-minded and successful people, tried themselves as scientists, and received a portion of energy to achieve their goals.
The Summer camp within the walls of our university was very organized, informative, and fun, so we have created a guide for future teams to organize their own summer camp.
Download Summer Camp Guidebook
iGEM Summer Camp 2022 became an inclusive project that brought together high school students from all over Kazakhstan and provided them with the opportunity to plunge into the world of science, in particular synthetic biology. Summer Camp 2022 clearly showed a huge number of children who have a great craving for knowledge and science in our country, which even more motivated us to provide schoolchildren with the opportunity to diversify their days and consider science from an exciting side.
Learn more about inclusivity of the Summer Camp here
Board game
We developed a tactile board game “Biosis” as an additional educational tool about different biological sciences, in particular synthetic biology, microbiology, cytology, and molecular biology. The game was designed in a way that both visually impaired students and sighted ones could play and explore the world of Biosis together.
Target: high schoolers, students with visual impairments, and the general public
Why a game?
The game is an effective approach to acquiring knowledge in an effortless and joyful way. Using this approach is incredibly helpful for exploring STEM topics that can be hard for schoolchildren to understand. In Kazakhstan, there is a scarcity of educational games dedicated to biology. Moreover, there is not any educational science-based games adapted for visually impaired children. Therefore, we decided to take up this challenge and created a “Biosis” board game.
Goal
Biosis aims to teach high school students to basics of synthetic biology and deepen their knowledge of other biological sciences. As the game was fully adapted for players with visual limitations, this playful learning approach also helps to form social links between visually impaired and healthy students. Game cards can be further used as flashcards for remembering covered topics:
Components
- plastic board with tactile cells, symbols, and Braille
- 3 types of cards (question cards, number cards and task cards)
- tactile game pieces
- box for storing cards
Board is divided into 4 sections dedicated to different fields of biology, namely cytology, microbiology, molecular biology and synthetic biology. Each section has its own question cards. They contain a question on one side and an answer on another.
There are 4 types of small cells with symbols that define an action of the player and 4 types of big cells with namings and functions as well.
How to play
During the game, players take turns drawing a card and doing actions. The Game is played in a series of rounds until one player wins. The game has simple rules:
- Start of the game: players choose tactile game pieces for making moves and define the first player by pulling number cards, one who gets a card with the highest value starts the game
- Players move along the four sides of the board and do the action depending on cell type.
- Players collect question cards as much as they can, to collect question cards they should answer the question on the card.
- Game ends when one of the players collects either 12 cards of one section or 3 cards of each section
Feedbacks and Points for improvement
We received feedback from school-gymnasium no.10 students with vision loss.
Moldir, 7 grade student:
'I really liked the game. It was interesting for me to know more about biology. Questions were hard for me as we just started biology classes but it is great that game will help us on our biology lessons. I never played this kind of board game. It is very engaging and easy to play. It will be great to have such kind of games from other lessons as music and literature.'
Dias, 7 grade student:
'I enjoyed the game, but I wish the game pieces were a bit larger because sometimes mine fell during the game. Questions were hard but tasks were interesting. I liked that tasks are also related to biology thanks to the task card I had today I know now why the water we drink should be cleaned and the amount of protein we should eat everyday. Surely, we will use the game while studying biology as you said that questions cover all biology topics. I suggest to change the material of question cards and make them like the board from plastic. We can use the paper ones too but they won't last for long'
More information about the inclusivity of the board game is in the Inclusivity section
Video Lectures
As part of our RemiSee social project, we aimed to record educational videos for school children about biology topics starting from mitosis and ending with the working principle of vaccines. Some of those videos were based on posters our team developed for secondary and high school students and distributed among schools in rural areas and orphanages in the previous year. By doing so, we wanted to make biology materials even more accessible and convenient so that every student would have the opportunity to study biology themselves. Overall, we recorded 42 videos that included introductions and thematic videos in Kazakh and Russian, as they are the main languages applied in schools to deliver educational materials. The videos' duration is about 3 to 5 minutes as we wanted to make topics as easily understandable as possible.
Videos are uploaded to the website of Remisee [ДОБАВЬТЕ КНОПКУ]
Research Speed-dating
The Research Speed-dating is an event that brought together professors and students interested in science. The invited guests spoke about their areas of research, their history and experience. Therefore, our goal of organizing the Speed-dating was to enable students to learn more about research and get acquainted with the research activities of professors. 3 professors agreed to be our honored guests of the event and talk with groups of students: Prof. Ferdinand Molnar, Prof. Martin Lukac and Dr.Dana Alina.
In addition, some research assistants took part in Speed-dating and had great conversations with students interested in science.
Speed-dating was very eventful and informative. 67 people signed up to participate in the event, and almost all those students came and enjoyed pleasant communication with people of science. Based on the statistics the greatest interest in our event was shown by 1-2 year undergraduate students (79.1%), as they are just starting their journey [figure 2].
Thanks to this event, our iGEM team was able to bring together experienced scientists with beginners and find a mentor for each student. The vast experience that professors and research assistants shared during the communication helped the students decide in the direction in which they really want to move on.
Guest talk
In organizing Guest talk Research 101, the iGEM team's goal was to provide students with the opportunity to learn more about conducting research at the university. This event was a great opportunity for science students to learn more about the research and ask questions to the faculty.
At the Guest Talks, students were able to learn about how to start their research with a professor, funding opportunities and practical information about doing research. The main guests of the event were: Professor Ivan Vorobyev, many years of academic and research experience in the field of biological research, and Professor Andrey Khalimon, Department of Chemistry. Besides, the research assistance of our team also had a talk during the Guest Talk and shared their experience in research with students.
Grow journals in Kazakh language
This year, our iGEM team had a chance to take part in the publication of the Ginkgo Biowork “Grow” journal. The magazine consisted of 49 biological articles and our task was to translate English articles into Kazakh and Russian languages. During the year we had several meetings with Ginkgo Bioworks representative Alexa and finally our team had successfully translated required articles. From our point of view, translation is an opportunity for our country to get acquainted with international research and articles in the scientific field, because there are not enough informative magazines in local languages. The design of the magazines is very beautiful and super beautiful, which should be of interest to young readers.
