Team:Florida/Public Engagement
Education and Public Engagement
Science for Life
UFlorida had the privilege of presenting our research and scientific methods to the “Science for Life” class at our university this year. Students in this class are actively searching for research in the scientific world, and have a strong interest in working in the laboratory setting. This presentation offered our team so much in regards to this iGEM season, and the future ones.
Since team UFlorida is new to the iGEM scene, presenting our research and the message of iGEM allowed us to reach a new audience we’ve never had access to before; we are expecting to have some of them apply to be a part of our team next year. This class has individuals with a wide range of majors, skills, and interests, so we are not only hoping to expand the size of our team from this interaction, but also the diversity of knowledge within our team as well.
As for this season of iGEM, we were able to practice presenting our project in a setting that mimicked what we’d be facing in Boston; stage fright is something a lot of us worry about so practicing on our peers was very useful for us. Not only did we tackle internal struggles during this presentation, we also acknowledged external issues by realizing what worked and didn't work with our explanations. During our presentation, we only had 15 minutes to get all of our information out- mirroring the 20 minutes we have during our presentation in Boston. Having the time constriction showed us that we needed to elaborate more on the mechanics of our plasmid (since we had time left over and students seemed confused about that part of the research).
At the end of our presentation, we had all 89 students fill out a survey about the complexity of scientific research articles for our Human Practices accessibility quest. As you will see in our Human Practices section, accessibility was the name of the game for our team this year. As we focused on visual disabilities, we also wanted to tap into the intellectual disabilities sector as well. Through our survey, we found that while students are interested in the results of research findings, they are turned off by the level of difficulty of the writing, thus leading them to give up on the article or not even attempt it in the first place. With this knowledge in mind, we updated our Wiki with more easily understood language.
Science Communigators
Continuing to partner with our wonderful university, we worked with a group called “ Science Communigators”, which works to translate dense,scientific information into much easier to understand content for students. After reviewing our Wiki, Science Communigators instructed us to add a description of CRISPR into our introduction, just to give the audience a better understanding of the basis of our project. Taking this advice into account with our accessibility knowledge, we added a hover text feature over “CRISPR” on our homepage. They also provided us with the lovely chance to talk about iGEM in the UF Newsletter once we return from Boston!
We thoroughly enjoyed working with fellow students who share a common goal as us and cannot wait to work with them in the future.