Education and Public Engagement

As MIT undergraduates, our team has opportunities most students could never imagine for themselves. When developing our outreach events, we wanted to use our privilege as an avenue to bring synthetic biology to younger students. We wanted to bring them opportunities to learn about synthetic biology, the life of a researcher, and foster curiosity and excitement about science. Team MIT believes middle school and high school students are the future of synthetic biology: in order for the field to continue to grow and contribute to the world, we need to engage with students. We found personal outreach particularly important because of misrepresentation of synthetic biology in the media. We organized a workshop at MIT Museum and presented at Biobuilder Club to engage with our local community. By reaching out to students and interacting and engaging in these conversations, we hope to bring more knowledge to the public about synthetic biology.

Our Education and Public Engagement Goals:

Engage with younger students to introduce them to synthetic biology.
Address misconceptions about biology
Create fun and interesting ways for students to learn about synthetic biology.

MIT Museum

The MIT Museum’s mission is to “engage the wider community with MIT’s science, technology, and other areas of scholarship in ways that will best serve the nation and the world in the 21st century.” This aligned well with our outreach goals, as described above. So we contacted Jennifer Novotney, the museum’s public programs coordinator, who helped last year’s MIT iGEM team organize an exhibit. She agreed to meet with us to discuss and plan our own exhibit. Based on our conversation with Jennifer, we developed activities with a target audience of 9 to 11 years old, that we could run with limited resources. We tried to address different areas of interest within our project and synthetic biology as a whole, as well as offer activities that would interest a wide range of students. We also developed instructions for our activities so they could be used as a lesson plan in middle and high schools. If you would like to see our exhibits, see the gallery below.

At the museum, we entertained a wide range of ages, from preschool age to adults. We worked hard to adapt our activities, and I believe we reached all but our youngest visitors (age < 7 years). We also struggled with language barriers with tourists + their children visiting the MIT museum, an unanticipated difficulty. If we were to continue educating children in a similar manner, we would prefer to concentrate on a school setting, because there we could firstly know the age of our students, and secondly, we typically would not encounter a language barrier with American students.

After our experience at the museum, we decided to redesign our activities as school modules. While we believe the museum exhibit was a success, we decided it was too difficult to make an exhibit that could both teach and appeal to such a wide range of ages. We decided to focus on middle and high school students because they have enough of a science background. We also determined that we should adapt the plasmid puzzle for bio builders.

Our Team

Presenting our Posters

Pipetting Station

Biobuilders

Biobuilders is an organisation designed to bring synthetic biology to students and education through apprenticeships, workshops, and other programs. Their main goal is to integrate principles of engineering and biology in a hands on manner. As such, we resonated with their mission and decided to contact them in the hopes of collaborating through running a camp or educational program. Through our discussions with Dr. Natalie Kuldell, head of Biobuilders, we determined that the approach that worked for both of our organisations was for us to present our project and principles of synthetic biology to their participants.

Their students were high schoolers who had about a week of synthetic biology instruction prior to our presentation, so we adapted our powerpoint from our lab presentation and the MIT Museum posters in order to present at an accessible level for the students. We also brought our Plasmid Puzzle kit so we could test its effectiveness with the high schoolers, and so they could practice with the essential building blocks of plasmids.

Plasmid Kit

We designed our Plasmid Kit as a fun way for students to learn the basics/principles of plasmid design. It consists of eight blocks and a plasmid outline printed on paper - a simplified plasmid with the pieces we felt were most essential for students to learn about (promotor, start, gene of interest, fluorescent protein, end, and three backbone pieces). Each block contained its name, general description, function, relevance to our project, and a helpful hint on where to place the block. Students would have to put the blocks in order on the plasmid outline. We decided on a 3 dimensional puzzle to appeal to more tactile learners and to make it feel less like a lecture or worksheet.

We adapted this learning activity from the MIT Museum experiment to be used in various environments, including high school class settings and seminars. We demoed the kit at the MIT Museum, where we learned that the puzzle is difficult to figure out without guidance and added explanations. After completing the puzzle with the help of our team members, museum go-ers understood more about plasmid design. We then brought the Plasmid Kit to the students at Biobuilders, who were studying synthetic biology for the first time this past summer. They were able to think critically about the blocks and figure out the order with less assistance. When we asked for feedback, the students said the activity was fun and helpful for understanding plasmid design.

We believe this plasmid kit could be an effective teaching kit for either AP Biology classes or for collegiate biology classes that cover plasmids and synthetic biology. While the AP Biology exam does not actually cover synthetic biology, many schools end a month after AP exams, so teachers have an extra month to fill. Students could learn about synthetic biology and plasmids from this kit during this time. In the future, we would like to contact AP Biology teachers to see if they’d value this type of learning tool.

Museum Exhibits

Posters- We created posters that described our project and the field of synthetic biology. We hoped these would encourage interest in current synthetic biology research and help people learn about its fundamental principles.
Misconceptions- We recognize that the public has negative perceptions of synthetic biology and genetic modification due to misconceptions. So, we ran a booth describing common misconceptions and why they are incorrect.
Swarm Activity 1 (Maze)- In this activity, we compared a maze to a microfluidic chip, allowing us to explain the importance of determining whether our cells were moving randomly toward our chemoattractants or in a directed fashion. One participant would verbally lead the others, who had their eyes closed, through the maze. That participant would act like a leader cell producing a chemokine gradient, and the others would form a “cell swarm” following the gradient.
Swarm Activity 2 (Point Attractions)- In this activity, groups of 4 or more were individually given instructions, such as “Stay in the group” or “Go to A but stay in the group”. These instructions would cause their swarms to congregate as certain points or form different shapes. This would help illustrate the idea of controlling large systems with only a few cells, and general swarm behavior.
Pipette Paintings- This station let kids learn how to pipette and imagine being a biologist or chemist when they grow up. It also let us demonstrate the concept of point sources and gradients. We used water color paper and water based paint so when participants pipetted drops of paint, it would act like a point source, and form a gradient when spreading on the paper.
Magnet and Iron Filing Swarms- The iron filings attracted toward the magnets represented a visual example of swarm behavior. While we didn’t know if this was accurate to our cells at the time, we valued the visual example of swarms that students could manipulate.
Plasmid Puzzle- In this activity participants tried to put blocks with the names of important building blocks (such as promoter, gene, etc) in order to form a plasmid. The blocks had information connecting them to our project, definitions, description of function, and a hint about where they should go.
Feedback- We set up a station to get feedback from museum-goers through a survey and a post it note board. We also obtained feedback from our activity booths based on our observations and conversations with participants.