Team:TokyoTech/Team Building
Team Building
Backgrounds & Problems
Tokyo Tech was a voluntary project conducted by juniors (3rd year students) who are interested in the competition, but we started to work as a club since 3 years ago. By working as a club, the freshmen (1st year students) and sophomores (2nd year students) are able to join the team earlier, providing them more exposures to experiments and modeling processes.
The problem is how to transfer knowledge and technology effectively.
For the past three years, our schedule was largely filled by the project so the members were not well educated. However, in order for Tokyotech to work with larger projects that might take many years, and to make good use of our field of expertise, it is necessary for the 3rd graders who play the main role to teach everything they have.
Therefore, from this year, we started making education programs and materials particularly for them and aimed to create a series of education and training as a team.
Contents of new activities
What we have done since April 2019 is as follows:
1: Molecular biology class for first-year students by second-year students
Because many Tokyo Tech students have not learned much about biology related subjects, it was necessary to learn from basic molecular biology for them to get involved with iGEM. Therefore, we gave the class to the second graders. We thought that by entrusting it to the second graders, they could build positive relationships with first graders, coach them and also revise their own knowledge.
We planned to improve this material and distribute it mainly to other Japanese teams. The contents of the classes ranged widely from knowing the types and characteristics of restriction enzymes to how to handle bio-based sites such as NCBI and Primer3, and we were able to share knowledge to 1st and 2nd graders that would be useful for future iGEM activities.
2: Wiki reading exercise and presentation by 1st and 2nd graders
There are two advantages to the wiki reading exercises and presentations implemented starting this year. First, it is a great chance to know what projects the iGEM team used to do in the past and how they did it. Most of the first and second graders from TokyoTech had little knowledge of iGEM competition itself. Therefore, we thought that it would be a good training for them to imagine ways to utilize synthetic biology from all kinds of perspective. The second is to train them to give presentations. In order to make a good presentation, it is necessary to understand the contents and be able to explain it efficiently. Also, it is necessary to increase the times to be able to speak well in front of people, we thought that presentation in the club would be a great place for practice it. Furthermore, corrections on the presentation itself and the proper ways for recognizing important issues can be advised by the third graders, and it will be useful for the first and second graders in their future activities. By practicing wiki reading exercises and presentations, iGEMâs themes from all fields iGEM such as medical applications and solutions to environmental problems can be re-examined, leading to richer ideas for future projects.
3: Leading activities in education-related human practice events
We have done educational human practice events such as a symposium for multiple high school students and university students, and a school visit to Koshigaya Kita High School first and second graders. The theme of the symposium was âGene from the newsâ. In recent years, the technology of gene editing and genome editing is spreading faster and faster throughout the world, but the knowledge on the usage and ethical understanding of how to confront it has not yet caught up with the advancement. In this symposium, we taught the proper knowledge about genome editing, invited lecturers to lecture on the history of technical ethics studies and provided an opportunity for participants to think about how genome editing should be handled. Also, we went to Koshigaya Kita High for school visit with the theme âLet's talk about genome editingâ. As with the symposium, we focused and lectured on principles and application examples of genome editing. The difference with the symposium is that it was more focused on discussion part. At the symposium, we asked each group to discuss and share about the title âWhat do we want to do with genome editingâ and exchange opinions freely. For the school visit, we have conducted it into three parts. First, each group were assigned to come out with a proposal on what they want to do by genome editing, and then they would receive reviews from other groups. And for the last part, they were asked to have to give a solution or objection to that opinion. This have made a constructive environment for the exchange of opinions and thoughts between groups. With this we hoped that they will remember this experience when they think about various issues, and not just genome editing.
4: Advanced Bio-Creative Design
In the school of life science and engineering of Tokyo Institute of Technology, where the current second-year students of iGEM TokyoTech belong, a class called âAdvanced Bio-Creative Designâ was held. This class are usually participated by students who are interested in biology, and they will be asked to decide their title and conduct research and experiments on that topic before presenting the results. Each year, iGEM TokyoTech's second graders took this class and made teaching materials particularly for the middle and high school students. However, this year, unlike the previous year, our team decided to conduct a genetic recombination experiment, similar to the iGEM project. Through this effort, the young members of our team have acquired the skills necessary for future iGEM projects, such as how to purchase and apply for the necessary genetic modification experiments, ways to assembling genetic circuits, designing primers and so on. With the better skills, our team will be more prepared for the iGEM next year, and can be expected to secure a more sufficient period of time for experiments.
Future prospects
For the future, further efforts by the team will be as follows:
- Learning sessions on how to assemble genetic circuits
- Presentation about iGEMâs wiki and related publications
- Improvement of contents presented on open campus event
- Ways to come up with ideas during project planning
- Summary of links to articles and websites that contain useful techniques and knowledge etc.
In the future, we would like to make the necessary curriculum as mentioned above while proceeding with the project for our team members to be better. Also, I think that those efforts that have been successful in this team can be shared with other Japanese teams that are currently cooperating with us, leading to greater excitement and atmosphere of the entire Japanese team.
