Team:Sydney Australia/Public Engagement
Outreach & Engagement
Introduction
For our outreach and public engagement, we decided to focus our efforts on engaging with diverse groups of people that are under-represented in science. As a gender and racially diverse team ourselves, the issue of the lack of diversity in science is extremely important to us. We felt that we had the ability to act as role models and show our target audiences, primarily children and teenagers, that there were people like themselves in science.
Activities
Wingara Mura – Bunga Barrabugu Winter School
Our first outreach activity was with the Wingara Mura – Bunga Barrabugu winter program that is run by the University of Sydney. This program allows Indigenous high school students to attend university workshops in their area of interest, with the aim of creating education opportunities for them.
What we did: We ran a workshop for students who were interested in science. We had a short session, but we wanted to give the students experience doing some of the most common techniques that we perform in the lab. We designed an activity called 'Fruit Forensics', where students were tasked with using DNA extraction to find out which fruit was 'contaminated' with bacteria and had given someone food poising. In reality, due to safety and time considerations, we adapted the protocols so that students would not be handling bacterially-contaminated fruit. Instead, we pre-isolated plasmids of different sizes and put them in the gel loading dye so that bands of a distinct size would appear. The students performed all of the steps used to isolate bacterial DNA, but the incubation and centrifugation steps were much shorter and all of the reagents were actually water. While we were initially hesitant about rigging the experiment, we were told that in many of our undergrad labs our experiments are rigged in a similar way. Ultimately, we decided that it was ok as long as we communicated effectively to the students the principles behind isolating bacterial DNA and gel electrophoresis.
What we learned: This was our first outreach activity, and so taught us a few different things. Firstly, we didn't realize the sheer amount of effort that needs to go into organizing even a short activity for a small number of students! There were a number of things that went wrong on the day, including pre-making our agarose gels and then finding out that we couldn't bring them down to the teaching labs, and our experiment going over time. We managed to keep our calm and get everything sorted out, which showed us that we were more resourceful and capable of solving problems than we realized.
The real learning experience, though, came from meeting and working with a group of young and eager students. One student in particular was very engaged with the material. She surprised us by knowing the basic skills that we were teaching, such as using pipettes and loading gels. She told us that her dream was to study molecular biology at the University of Sydney, and that she'd been volunteering in one of the labs just to have a chance to learn about science. This was a really humbling moment. As molecular biology students at the University of Sydney, we were living her dream. More than that, though, it reminded us that we were living our own dreams. It's very easy to get caught up in the difficulties and stresses of a university degree, and to forget how incredibly fortunate we are to have the opportunities that we do.
Nathan and Isobel with students from Wingara Mura – Bunga Barrabugu Winter School
Science in the City
Science in the city is an annual exposition held by the Australian Museum, to celebrate Science week. The event is targeted at school groups, mostly primary school age. The school groups attending were from different areas of the city, so the students were from very diverse backgrounds.
What we did: We volunteered for the JAMS (Joint Academic Microbiology Seminars) booth. This meant that the activities the children performed were pre-organised. There were samples of pond water to look at under microscopes, plates with colourful and fluorescent E. coli, a hand-held microscope, and microbe stuffed toys. There were also educational posters behind the table. Because we did not have the power to organise the activities, we decided that we could still keep our outreach goal of ‘diversity’ in mind. We decided to observe what activities the male and female students were interested in, and whether there was any difference in the number of each group that came up to the booth when we had an all-female volunteer team vs when we had males behind the table.
What we learned: There were slight patterns in what initially brought the students over to the table. In general, girls tended to be more attracted by the stuffed toys the the boys were. However, once students were at the table every student was interested in every activity. The gender of the people volunteering did not seem to make a different on the gender of the students approaching the table. However, we did notice that there were consistently more girls at our table than boys.
JAMS Booth at Science in the City!
Innovation Games
Innovation Games is an annual Science Fair, held in Western Sydney, that provides science related activities for kids and families. This event appealed to us because it is specifically designed to engage a diverse audience that may not usually have much exposure to science. The setting, Western Sydney, is a lower socio-economic area with people from a wide range of ethnic backgrounds. The event is set up outside a football stadium before a game, so it attracts people on their way to watch the game, including people who normally wouldn’t take their children out just for a science event.
What we did: For this event, we knew that there would be thousands of children and adults of all ages. Therefore, we designed a few different activities that would appeal to a range of ages and scientific interests. These included the ever-popular strawberry DNA extraction, an array of agar art we did with GFP - E. coli, an activity making DNA double helices out of lollies, and a few informational posters on DNA and genetic engineering. By far our most popular event, however, was a synthetic biology drawing game. The aim of this game was to introduce the idea that scientists could put genes together to make different ‘types’ of organisms. Kids would randomly pick out four cards - three descriptors and one type of animal - and draw what they said. By the end of the day, we had hundreds and hundreds of drawings. We also decided to try the classic ‘draw a scientist’ activity, where you ask kids to draw what they think a scientist looks like. This activity has been done many times, and often children will draw an eccentric-looking white man, regardless of the race and gender of the child themselves. We were interested to see what would happen if we ran the activity ourselves.
What we learned: We were very pleased with how the activities turned out, especially the drawing games. We stuck the drawings up on the inside and outside of our marquee, and eventually covered four walls! It was really nice to see kids bringing their parents over to look at their drawings. The results of our ‘draw a scientist’ activity were very interesting, as they differed from what previous studies have found. We found that most kids would draw themselves, or someone like them. We also had a few kids draw portraits of members of our iGEM team! It was great to see that while most members of our team do not fit the image of the 'quintessential' white male scientist, the children still recognised us scientists. For us, this really drove home the point that diversity of representation is extremely important.
Innovation Games Gallery
USYD Open Day
We were invited to have a booth at the University of Sydney Open Day to represent the various pathways to Synthetic Biology offered at our university. In the School of Life and Environmental Sciences tent, surrounded by interactive stick insect, honey bee, and other animal exhibits, we were pleasantly surprised by exactly how much traffic our table attracted!
What we did: At our booth we had set up our DNA-building exercise from Innovation Games, some fluorescent plates, and a gel loading exercise. This activity was particularly popular. We challenged students to attempt to load some loading buffer carefully into a well with a pipette. The visitors all enjoyed challenging each other to pipette correctly and not rupture the delicate wells!
We received many questions from the visitors about what we were studying, what iGEM is, and what we were doing for our project. They were intrigued by how we were all coming at the project from different angles and by all the various pathways that they could come to iGEM from engineering, mathematics, chemistry, software, genetics, microbiology, and even humanities!
We also had an opportunity to explain some of the benefits and limitations of doing the project at our university. We explained that the project is a lot more work than a standard unit of study, so whilst it’s fun they have to be prepared to put in the hard yards! We also explained how lucky we were to actually be receiving study credit points for iGEM as not all universities offer that opportunity to their students.
What we learned: Open Day made us realise that iGEM truly is an interdisciplinary project that requires and develops a wide range of skills from talking to the students about iGEM.
Interacting with the community of students who haven’t had the science education that we have highlighted not only how far we’ve come in the last three years of our degrees, but also how much we’ve learned over the past six months.
On a more negative note, trying to elucidate the paths to synthetic biology for these prospective students forced us to confront how limited the opportunities are for undergraduates in our state. Many universities still do not have any sort of Synthetic Biology specific units or majors. We believe this hinders diversity through lack of opportunity.
Isobel at the USYD Open Day Booth
Sharing our work
We were lucky enough to be invited to present at the JAMS Sydney Microbiology Talks and at the UNSW Synthetic Biology Symposium.
JAMS Sydney
JAMS Sydney is one of the most amazingly geeky things out there. A bunch of microbiologists and microbe enthusiasts meet at a bar to discuss and present current research, drink (responsibly), and network.
It was absolutely fantastic after months of watching esteemed academics present their work at these talks to be invited to give one ourselves! We got a chance to sum up our work so far, and it challenged us to present our project in an open and easily understandable manner for those not in the Synbio community.
We got to see how open the general public were to the concept of our project, no one seemed particularly alarmed about safety or about the concept of using GMO organisms to make psilocybin for therapeutic use. We got some great questions which allowed us to improve how we present our project in future.
UNSW Symposium
UNSW challenged us to frame our project in terms of sustainability and present to students, academics, and their friends at UNSW. As sustainability wasn’t one of our Human Practices focuses this presented a fascinating opportunity to think about our project in this framework.
Luckily this coincided with our chat with Sam Bannister from the Lambert Initiative (read more in our Psilocybin Talks page!). As he’s a chemical engineer by trade we asked him about the environmental impacts of chemical synthesis. Using his responses, we put psilocybin synthesis under the microscope and found that it uses and produces numerous toxic and/or environmentally harmful substances. E.coli culture though? Pretty much just yeast, glucose, and some protein!
Whilst we weren’t able to receive questions for this presentation, numerous people approached us afterwards saying that they appreciated our contribution to the sustainability discussion. It was fantastic to feel like we helped to educate people about the benefits of Synthetic biology!
At JAMS!
At the UNSW Symposium!
Synthetic Biology Australasia (SBA) Conference
We were fortunate enough to be invited to present our project at the annual SBA conference. This was a great experience for us, as it was the first time most of us had been to an academic conference. Presenting our project to a room full of academics was nerve-wracking but very rewarding, and has definitely helped us prepare for our talk at the Jamboree. We got the chance to answer some questions after our talk, which helped us see which aspects of our project we had not communicated clearly enough, or aspects that we had missed.
The Team at SBA
