Team:Dundee Schools/Engagement
Dundee Schools
Engagement
To engage with the public and promote our project, we decided to showcase it to our two schools (St Paul's RC Academy and Grove Academy). The presentation allowed the pupils to have some insight to the work behind our project and give them an idea of the research being done in the field of synthetic biology, inspiring them to think about the opportunities available in a science career. Our presentations received great feedback through a questionnaire we made, which let us know that we successfully taught the pupils something they hadn’t known about before. The questionnaire was composed of five questions and we handed out 20 of them to the students, teachers and advisors watching the presentation. Before the presentation 17 out of 20 wrote that they did not know what RNA interference was and how it could be used to treat bacterial infections. We then asked some questions with a scale of 1-5 (with 1 being the lowest score and five being the highest). The average score for the presentation was 4.2. We also asked how well informed the audience was after the presentation on the RNA intereference concept. The average score for this was 4.1. We also asked how easy the scientific part of the presentation was to understand (with 1 being easy and 5 being hard) and the average score for this was 2.4. Finally we asked if the presentation would be suitable to present in front of a general audience with varied levels of experience with science. 15 people out of 20 said it would be suitable. These results showed us that we successfully managed to create a presentation that was very effective at educating pupils the work we have been doing for iGEM.
