Team:Unimelb/Public Engagement
Education and Public Engagement
North Carlton Railway Neighbourhood House Workshops:
Over two full days during the September school holidays, our team members ran science workshops at the North Carlton Railway Neighbourhood House for a total of 40 primary school students aged 6-10 years old. This was an initiative to increase the science literacy amongst children in an underserved community and inspire them to become interested in biology, chemistry, physics and ecology.
Our first workshop revolved around biology and basic engineering principles. Group activities included “Draw a scientist” where children could express and re-imagine the role of science in our community and were inspired to see themselves as future scientists. Students were also guided to create models of DNA, studied capillary action by staining flowers and built balloon powered race cars. Along the way, iGEM team leaders explained the principles of genetics and foundations of synthetic biology through discussions in small groups.
Our second workshop was focussed on environmental sustainability, highlighting the importance of renewable energy and dangers of human pollution. Group activities included constructing wind turbines using paper cups to explain energy production and creating “fossils” of sea shells. The students were highly engaged in discussing ways to minimise their carbon footprint and environmental impact in their everyday lives. A highlight of the day was a demonstration of a hydraulic motor we had constructed using a plastic water bottle. Students were also engaged in discussion about the potential solutions synthetic biology can provide for the future through a demonstration of oil spill cleanups.
Throughout the process, we also limited waste and consumables as much as we could and collaborated with the University of Melbourne Branch of Engineers Without Borders to borrow materials for our demonstrations as well as House of Cards Cafe to reuse their plastic waste.
Conducting the school workshops was an important way to achieve our goals of educating the local community about the importance of science and synthetic biology. By engaging with a young group of primary-aged children, we were able to act as accessible role models for them and inspire them to learn more about science.
Engagement
Our consultation with Jessica Welch was important to finalise our project design and her experience as a microbiologist and former work at Addgene was pivotal in providing us with valuable resources. Her recommendations to explore bacterial strains that were optimised for the expression of mammalian proteins was taken into account for the planning of potential troubleshooting experiments. Jessica was also extremely helpful in finding additional resources on INP-mediated display, including discovering related iGEM biobricks. Our greatest takeaway from our conversation with Jessica was to consider realistic proof-of-principle experiments at every stage of our project design.
Bioquisitive - Andrew Gray
Our visits to Melbourne’s local DIYbio space, Bioquistitive, and interviews with its founder Andrew Gray helped us connect with synthetic biologists in the broader community. The Bioquisitive laboratory was inspiring to us in terms of making the most out of very few resources.
Andrew also provided us with important advice for our outreach events and introduced a number of new assembly techniques to us, including MoClo and uLoop systems. Our discussions were inspiring for our team to consider the potential application of our project and to imagine it as a true product. Andrew was also a pivotal contact to help us connect with New England Biologicals as a sponsor and we are very grateful for his support and advice throughout our journey.
WINTER workshop
The winter workshop was a two day intensive session for our team members to better understand the different aspects of running and planning a fully functional efficient team project.
Fundraising and sponsorship
Fundraising and sponsorship was a large aspect our team focused on in order to create our project. We focused on both internal and external sources of sponsorship. Kate Grimms who organises Philanthropic Gifts and Advancement for the MDHS of the University of Melbourne advised us in sponsorship, managing relations and the differences between donations and sponsorships. With the knowledge we gained, we created a sponsorship prospectus that embodies the goals of iGEM and our team to distribute to potential sponsors and donors.
Social Media
To improve our social media presence and gain traction for iGEM in Melbourne we turned to the advice of expert Lep Beljac. To improve pitching content we created a marketing and media kit, where we had a database of content, logos and key messages we could access. Also, we set goals and management plans for all our social media platforms.
Project Management
During our winter workshop we also consulted Ed Stanley, Christine Wells, Vijay Rajagopal, and Kansan Sethurman. These consultations shaped our project in two ways, our planning for wet lab and also a more business outlook on project management
Christine advised our team to first understand how bacteria works and to make sure to test and build positive and negative controls to ensure the effectiveness of our experimentation. Ed Stanley suggested that we create a list for our workflow and advised us that restriction enzyme digests is not the easiest way to clone. With this advice, we went on to research other ways suggested such as Golden Gate, NEBuilder-HiFi, infusion cloning and snapgene. Vijay Rajapogal helped us shape questions we were tackling for our project, such as does the fluorescence of our bacteria dependent on the concentration.
In further consultations with Ed Stanley, we discussed our design and experimental plan for developing the cell surface glutamate biosensor. He recommended that we begin by expressing the sensor domain in the cytosol before adding the INP domain for cell surface localisation. This would allow us to confirm that we could produce correctly folded and functional sensors in E. coli before proceeding. He also recommended that we test the INP indpendantly by expressing a simple fusion protein containing INP and green fluorescent protein domains. Following Ed’s advice, we acquired DNA for a part that fit this description (BBa_K2833009) developed by the 2018 BJRS China iGEM team.
Dr. Kannan Sethuraman presented project management to our team in a business product development perspective. We focused on a couple points, management of time, costs and performance. As a university team, it was greatly important for us to plan accordingly with the funding we could raise as we had to be especially careful about the scope of our project both monetary and time efficiency wise. We also studied what makes a good team with Dr Sethuraman working through key success factors in a case study in product development, putting focus on individual pressures, collective goals and critical junctures.