Team:Saint Joseph/Public Engagement
Education and Engagement
As a team we decided that the best way to explain our project to public would be special activities and presentations for different age groups. Especially since we are high school students, throughout our project we have been aware of how important it was to explain people about our studies properly.
Last year in october our current PI Handan Kesim kicked off work by founding IGEM club in our school. In this way an opinion was formed about IGEM in our school. Afterwards main team had been chosen from the club members and studies started with this team. In brief we started this whole IGEM marathon by training ourselves.
In our Human Practice works, we believed that planting a new idea to young minds would be most effective so we organised various activities with children (starting from 5 ages).
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Oyak Renault Automobile Factory Visit | 30 March 2019
The goal of this visit was to present our idea which was cleaning the wastewater of automobile factories with the same enzyme, laccase, similar to our idea of cleaning the wastewater of textile industries. We talked to Ms. Özlem Sönmez, an environmental engineer in the factory. First, she told us how the cars were being painted, the mechanism of the factory, how a certain proportion of purified wastewater goes to the purification system of our city. Then, we presented our project. After our presentation, she told us that she was going to see about it herself and present our project to the administration.
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Waffle Day | 25 April 2019
We organised a waffle day in our school as IGEM club on 25 April, DNA day. We sold cookies, cakes, waffles, börek also cookies in the shape of DNA. We used the revenue of waffle day for our team's need.
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Private Little Prince School Visit | 16 May 2019
In the goal of presenting IGEM competition, our project, synthetic biology, biotechnology and wastewater concept we went to Little Prince Schools which was established by our graduates. We made our presentations suitable to 3 different levels; kindergarten (5 years olds), third graders in primary school (8 years olds), first and second graders in high school (15-16 years olds).
First, we started our activities with primary school. We presented ourselves and explained our goal for the competition to 5 years olds. Then, we played a little theatrical game about the pollution that wastewater of factories causes to a lake.
After that, we distributed the DNA papers we have prepared to students, showed them the spiral structure of DNA and explained the functions of it. Also, we helped each student to make their own DNA model with play dough. Lastly, we represented them the function of bacteria with the help of our good and bad bacteria drawings.
For third graders in primary school, we made an interactive presentation in the conference hall. Our presentation was a question and answer with the students. Actually, third graders impressed us with their answers. We found out that all of them had an idea in the field of biology.
Lastly, the presentation we made to high schools contained more theoretical information. We explained to them genetics, synthetic biology, biotechnology, IGEM, how we get prepared for IGEM and the main subject of our project: laccase.
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İSKİ Visit | 2 August 2019
On Friday, August 2, we visited the İSKİ ( İstanbul Water and Sewerage Department) waste water department. The people we had a small meeting there, were Asian Basin Protection Waste Water Control branch manager Mr. Mehmet Kalaycı, Environmental Engineer Mr. İhsan Oruç, Mr. Atilla Şahin and chemical engineer Ms. Esra Olcay and we explained them our project. We explained that our aim is to clean the water contaminated with textile dyes before sending the textile factories’ wastewater to the city's waste water system and to ensure that these waters are reused. We have briefly explained our experiment and we will do this in a biological way. They showed great interest in our project. And they said they would like to follow the results, which made us happy. According to Mr. Mehmet Kalaycı, the practice currently used in Istanbul is the prohibition of polluting factories to send these waters to the sewage system without any treatment. There is a penalty. Although the penalty is the closure of the firm, companies can be given a certain period of time and reopen. What ISKI want is the purification of the desired water from the companies and then transferring it to the sewer. Companies do this cleaning chemically and complain about the cost. This section of ISKI strictly supervises the companies. We are very happy that we learned all of this.
Our Questionnaire
We took a poll to properly all students of our school. An average of 700 students participated in our environmental survey. We recorded the results on the pie charts and noted the most appropriate answers.
Q1 : Do you know what biotechnology is?
Q2 : Do you know anything about the working field of synthetic biology?
Q3 : Do you have any information about the treatment of water contaminated with paints in textile and car industries?
Q4 : In which way do yuo think the water is decontaminated most?
Q5 : Do you think that contaminated water has any harm to factory workers?
Q6 : Should all textile factories have treatment systems?
Q7 : Do you think that the treatment systems of textile factories are well controlled?
Q8 : What would you think of if there is a method where the bacterias decontaminate the water?
Q9 : Do you believe that the method of decontaminating water will change in the future?
Q10 : Could environmental protection be made by using synthetic biology?
Q11 : Do you have any idea about water treatment in our country?
Q12 : Do you think our coutry is among the countries that will experience drought in the future?
Q13 : Do you know what ÇEVKO is?
Q14 : What do you do to protect the environment?- Classifying the garbage and throwing to recyling bins
- Reviewing technological products that are working with renewable energy and integrating them to my life
- Using natural waste as manure
- Collecting garbage in shore
- Trying to eat less meat, trying wear second hand clothes or clothes of my mother, trying not to litter, reducing the plastic usage, trying to inform my friends.
- Trying not to use plastic pipets
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Saint Joseph's New Synthetic Biology Laboratory
The biology department in our school always mentions the importance of synthetic biology and the future place of synthetic biology in the lessons to the students. This year, our biology teachers established a synthetic biology laboratory in our school so that students could apply synthetic biology in more detail.
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Presentation to Teachers | 1 October 2019
We made a presentation to our director, our assistants director and our science department's teachers explaining how we prepared for the IGEM competition. In the presentation we talked about how we developed our project, how we distributed the duties, our experiments and our human practices studies. We got positive feedbacks from our teachers; they said they liked our project and found it to be improved. They also congratulated us that it was very important for Saint Joseph High School and for us to have high school students in such an international platform.
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Presentation to the 9th Grade
We made a presentation on IGEM for 9th grade (15-16 ages) in our school. In our presentation we briefly talked about what is IGEM competition and explained our own project “Lakecase”. When we talked about our project, we mentioned water pollution caused by the textile industry and what laccase enzyme we can use to clean dirty water in textile factories.
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River Blue The Movie
When we watched the trailer of the River Blue, we saw that movie was about the contamination of the rivers with textile water, just our projects scope. We get in contact with the movies director Roger Williams, luckily he was on Turkey for a visit. However we could not arrange a face to face meeting due to busy agendas. Then we did a Skype call with him on October 18. During the call we told him how we got excited with his movie and he told us that how his movies subject matches with our project and wished us success.
Watch the trailer River Blue Movie on youtube
Visit the River Blue Movie website
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How Human Practice Affect Our Project?
In the whole preparation process of IGEM competition, the positive influence of human practice studies on our project cannot be ignored. During our experiments, we went out of the laboratory, asked people their opinions about our project and we developed our project in accordance with this ideas. Considering how each of our human practice studies affects our project:
- On average of 700 students participated in our survey on the treatment of dyed water in textile factories, which we organized in our school. In our survey, when we asked the students of our school the idea of cleaning the dyed water from textile factories cheaper than the current methods and biological way, 98% of the participants said that they found this idea to be useful. Thus, we were of the opinion that the idea of using the laccase enzyme in our project would be the best for both the environment and the factories and we decided to participate in the IGEM competition with this project idea
- During our visit to Renault Car Factory, we evaluated with Ozlem Sonmez, who is the director for environmental studies in the factory, about implementing our project not only in textile factories but also in automobile industry to clean up the contaminated water. Opportunity of using Laccase in potential different industries gave hope to us and we realized that our project can be developed further in the future.
- We presented our Project and IGEM Competition on the presentation that we did in SAJEV High School. At the end of the presentation we got very nice feedback from the students and teachers, and they show their interest in joining IGEM competition in the coming years. Possibility of having more teams from our country at IGEM in future made us very happy as a team.
- We also presented our project to ISKI (Istanbul Water and Sanitation Department) and received the experts' opinion about our project. At the end of our meeting they declared that they appreciated our project and found expendable for the city, also wanted us to be in contact with them about our projects results. We were excited to hear positive comments from an official organisation, this led us to believe that this project can be developed and expanded to future.