Student-Taught Course

Course Overview

The Rice iGEM team has developed a student-taught course to introduce beginner students to synthetic biology and prepare new team members for developing a project proposal. In the document below, we provide the course materials, including the syllabus and all assignment prompts and hope that they can be useful to other iGEM teams in the future. At Rice, the course was taught in the Spring semester as a 1-credit hour class. The course timeline and topics are shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1. The overview of the course topics.

The purpose of the course was to familiarize students with engineering design process and teach them how to use primary literature to develop new ideas. While the course covered some fundamental concepts such as gene expression and genetic circuits, the larger focus was on promoting independent learning and use of online materials that can help students explore new developments in synthetic biology and come up with their own project designs. The course activities targeting these goals included open-ended prompts, in-class group activities (Figure 2), project proposal writing, and a final presentation. By the end of the course, student teams presented a design proposal for a novel synthetic biology application related to one of the iGEM competition tracks.

Figure 2. An example of in-class activities. The students are combining genetic parts to create a circuit for zinc biosensor.

Student Outcomes

To keep track of student progress in the course, we analyzed the results of graded assignments and implemented self-assessment surveys. Throughout the course, students completed readings and online quizzes that helped them gain an understanding of new topics. Instructors checked quiz answers and addressed the most common mistakes in class. Quiz scores showed that students were able to comprehend new material through pre-class independent learning. On most homeworks, the mean score was above 90% (Figure 3). The class also had a midterm exam that tested student comprehension of fundamental synthetic biology concepts. The exam scores ranged from 82% to 100%. In surveys, students reported that the class helped them better understand the types of problems addressed with synthetic biology and become more comfortable with reading and analyzing primary literature (Figure 4). As a result of the course, 60% of the students decided to join the iGEM team and 40% assumed leadership positions.

Figure 3. Course outcomes. (A) Mean scores on homework assignments. (B) The effects of the course on student learning. (C) The effects of the course on student interest in iGEM.

Our course allowed students with little or no prior experience in synthetic biology to develop novel ideas and design proposals. This was possible due to the curriculum which provided multiple opportunities for practice and independent learning, and incorporated consistent feedback from graduate advisors and instructors. We are continuing to work on course improvement and new assignments. The course will be offered again at Rice University next semester.

Course Materials

Presentations

We thought that it was important to reach out to our different age groups so we presented to a wide variety of students. We used surveys, physical and electronic, to gauge the levels of our audience and made sure to adjust our presentation according to the group that we were presenting to from the survey feedback. This presentation example is the presentation that we used for the RESP students at Rice University.

Example Presentation

Undergraduates

REU presentation

We presented to the REU BioNetworks and BioXFEL interns at Rice University. They were already familiar with synthetic biology so instead in the presentation we focused more on the details in our own project and they asked important questions that helped us to consider new aspects of our project.

IBB Symposium

We presented our summer research at the IBB (Institute of Biosciences and Bioengineering) Summer Research Symposium. We were able to interact with other undergraduates participating in biology research and talk about our project with graduate students.

Survey for RESP surveys

RESP presentation

We presented to students in the RESP(Rice Emerging Scholars Program). They are incoming freshmen at Rice University from across the country who go through the program to prepare for the rigor of Rice STEM curricula. As not all of the students were studying biological sciences, we adjusted our presentation accordingly and instead focused on research experience and our own iGEM experiences. We also gave the students an online survey because we felt as though the medium was more appropriate and also to gauge responses to our presentation.

High Schoolers

SAST

We presented to the IBB (Institute of Biosciences and Bioengineering) Summer Academy Students from the Science Academy of South Texas (SAST). These students were already familiar with the synthetic biology ideas so we shifted our presentation style so that they could come up with their own project ideas. After our presentation, we handed out surveys for the students to fill out and we hoped to gather more opinions on our project. It was nice to see how our presentation had helped to understand synthetic biology and also their opinions on whether our project would make crops a GMO or not.

Here are two responses that we received, to download the full collection of surveys Click here

Middle Schoolers

Rice SPLASH!

Rice SPLASH! is an educational day hosted at Rice university aimed towards middle schoolers from the local Houston area. Rice students from all over campus were invited to teach short lessons about something that they are passionate about. The Rice iGEM team chose to teach a lesson about synthetic biology. We made it more enjoyable for middle schoolers by having fun activities such as extracting the DNA from wheat germ, picking traits for a hypothetical super-bacteria to help people, and using blocks to design a simple genetic circuit.

iGEM at Rice SPLASH!

Community Engagement

Recruitment

This year we made a more active attempt at recruitment during our competition cycle. We have found that recruitment for the Rice iGEM team has been difficult in the past because of the proximity to summer and also because there are less active team members. So, this year we decided to showcase the progress of our project to allow more people to learn about iGEM. We held booths at our beginning of the year club fairs and research fairs. Our team members manned the booths and talked about iGEM as a whole and also about our 2019 team project. We were met with positive feedback and interest which we hope can be carried into recruitment for next year's team.

Our recruitment flyer

Our team will also be holding an open presentation on campus on October 25th to showcase our Jamboree presentation to fellow Rice undergraduates. We are trying this out for the first time but we are hoping that this can give interested persons an insight into the opporunities and experiences that iGEM can offer. We are also excited to present all our hard work to our fellow undergraduates and also advisors and other mentors who helped us along our journey.

Outreach

Stickers

We chose to have stickers as a fun way to remind people about both the Rice iGEM team and also our project for this year. Our project this year has a very important end goal as we are finding a way to find an intermediate way to tackle climate change so it is important that we have a lasting impact.

Social Media

Our team stayed connected through various forms of social media as a way to showcase updates about our project. This helped to show our audience the many intermediate steps of iGEM that come before the final polished presentation at the Jamboree.

Team:Rice/Public Engagement