Team:Michigan/Outreach

Outreach: Skyline High School Summer Camp, sponsored by Women in Science & Engineering Program

PURPOSE:

Outreach is an important aspect of synthetic biology and to our team here at the University of Michigan (U-M). From our previous experience last year interviewing the general public, we notice a common trend of negative connotation associated with the synthetic biology field. In order to address this issue, our team will target the education of the younger generation, especially high school students. Since synthetic biology is such a dynamic and expandable field, we believe a younger audience would be more willing to accept new ideas over an older generation that may already have preconceived notions of synthetic biology. For this year, our team collaborated with Women in Science & Engineering (WISE), a program on the U-M campus. WISE hosted a science and engineering all-day camp for one week during the summer for high school from across the United States to participate in. Our team hosted a two day bio-laboratory session for the students that taught techniques commonly used in synthetic biology and critical problem solving skills.

AUDIENCE:

We have a wide range of students from across the United States that came to our campus for the science and engineering day camp. Some came from as far as Texas and Minnesota to local cities in the metro Detroit area of the state of Michigan. The general age ranged from 14 to 18 yrs. old (9th to 12th grade). Since the program was mainly targeted at females interested in science and engineering, we still had one male student among the 48 students that attended the camp.

TIME/LOCATION:

Hosted by WISE on the University of Michigan- Ann Arbor campus; June 18 to 22nd 2012

ACTIVITIES:

still editing this particular sections. pictures are currently being put into collages as a form of presentation. the following sections will have our ppt and agenda of the day posted or hyperlinked? the ppt and documents are in google doc format 1) College Panel 2) pGLO Experiment 3) introduction to iGEM and the field of synthetic biology 4) Survey/feedback session

CONCLUSION:

The two-day sessions we hosted with the students was a great success and would not have been possible with the support and enthusiasm from the students, teachers, and our team! It was unfortunate we only had two days with the students, but we left our mark with the students. At the beginning, the students shared the same common misconception as the general public did on synthetic biology. For example, when we asked them “what does synthetic biology mean to you?” we encountered the typical answer of “creating frankinstein! Or Mewtwo! (pokemon reference)” or “creating something from foreign things”. It was interesting to hear their responses, but we redefined synthetic biology for them. Additionally, we mentored the students with the many advantages and examples of synthetic biology through the pGLO experiment. During our session of discussing possible applications of pGLO, it was amazing to see how quickly the students learned from our synthetic biology lecture and started thinking critically of what it means to do synthetic biology. Our survey of the 48 students showed a significant amount of the students interested in joining the iGEM at the high school division and would more likely to talk about what they learned about synthetic biology with their friends, family, and teachers.

FUTURE DIRECTION:

Teaching and advocating synthetic biology does not end after the two day campus. Our team has been invited to the local high school in the city of Ann Arbor, Michigan called Skyline High School to participate in their local science fair and mentor students about synthetic biology techniques. Their science fair will be hosted in the winter semester (January or February 2013), so it is unfortunate we do not have any information to share with the iGEM community at this moment. However, we believe we have built a strong connection with the high school students at the camp. We intend to continue this collaboration with WISE again in the summer of 2013 and recruit high school students on to our team help mentor them through laboratory techniques and regulations. We feel it is crucial to integrate the young generation into our project because they would be at the heart of a dynamically growing field of synthetic biology. Education and advocacy for this field is not a simple task that can be done overnight. We must invest in long term goals and continue to share our enthusiasm the public, especially the young adults.

Outreach: Within the lab

This year we hosted two 9th grade siblings, Ocean and Ivor Huang, from [insert high school name here] High School in China. During their stay, they subcloned LVA into the submission plasmid pSB1C3, and made media to feed this hungry project.
One of our team member, Corey Howe, is an undergraduate from Bowling Green State University, Bowling Green, Ohio.