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Our Human Practices is centred around improving public engagement and tackling the lack of education of synthetic biology in the UK and overseas. In particular we are targeting education at a secondary school and university level, focusing on the interdisciplinary nature of the subject and assessing diversity. We want to highlight the benefits and potential applications of this new scientific field, as well as trying to uncover the reasons why synthetic biology doesn’t get as much positive attention as it should have.
We are working hard to introduce a new synthetic biology module to The University of Exeter’s curriculum, which will be available to students as soon as September 2017. For school children we have created a board game, BioMech, which educates students in key synthetic biology concepts in an easy to understand and engaging way. Furthermore, we have visited school and fairs, giving talks and running workshops where we aim to give children an introduction to what synthetic biology is and how it already affects their lives for the better.
By interviewing researchers, academics and other professionals within the scientific community and presenting their opinions in a fun and educational way, we hope to have made synthetic biology a more attractive discipline to the general public.
We initially had the idea of an educational synthetic biology board game named BioMech early on in the summer when we discovered the shocking lack of synthetic biology education in the United Kingdom. The aim of BioMech is to introduce secondary and sixth form students to scientific field in a fun and interactive way. The game teaches students to plasmid construction, biological parts and other essential biological concepts like mutation.
After researching synthetic biology education in the UK, we discovered that there is a limited number of cheap and nationally available educational resources for biology, with many teachers needing to create their own material to inspire students. Furthermore, there is also no education in synthetic biology for secondary school or A level students.
In response to this we decided to get into contact with Edexcel, a GCSE and A Level exam board, and enquired the possibility of introducing synthetic biology in the syllabus. They responded with “iGEM could produce support resources, for the existing A level, which introduced ideas of synthetic biology and which could be used as ‘stretch and challenge’ materials by teachers”. At this point we focused our efforts on making BioMech an easily accessible educational tool that can be used alongside the current syllabus, building on the cellular biology and genetics that are currently taught at GCSE and A-Level biology. >
The game teaches students about plasmid construction, biological parts and other essential biological concepts like mutation. The game starts with 10 BioBrick cards for each player who places 5 cards on the board to construct their plasmid. The winner of the round is the player that designed the plasmid that will be most useful in a randomly chosen scenario, the most appropriate plasmid is determined by card scores and player discussion. After a round, 5 more cards are dealt and the game continues, the winner is the person that wins the most rounds.
After making an initial prototype the team took the game to The Judd School, a secondary school in Tonbridge, United Kingdom, to be tested by a group of GCSE students. We started off the day by introducing the iGEM project as well as explaining a few fundamental synthetic biology terms such as BioBricks and plasmids. After forming two groups, the students began to play the game under our supervision and quickly grasped the rules. All of the students got involved with the game, often reacting enthusiastically whenever a mutation occurred in a cell.
Even though the game was a hit with the students, we still wanted to determine if the game was a viable option as an education resource; the game needed to be able to educate and inspire students. After the session we conducted a number of interviews with some of the students, with a few saying that they were much more likely to study biology after playing the game.
I barely knew about any of this before today, I’m definitely much more likely to take Biology for A-Level.
We interviewed two teachers at The Judd School to ask if they would consider using a learning resource such as our own in their lessons and if they thought the board game would prepare their students for entering iGEM in the coming years. The head of key stage 3, Dr Courel, thought that as the game enables students to consider real life applications for genetically modified organism, and that this would aid the students when thinking about their own iGEM project. The head of biology at Judd School, Mrs Andrew’s thought our game would make a great intermediate step between theory in the classroom, and introducing students to the wet lab.
>The Judd School visit was both a successful and productive, as we got plenty of high quality feedback from both students and teachers on how we could improve the game to educate more effectively and reach out to more schools.
The students suggested a number of minor improvements to the gameplay through a short survey, the results of this can be found here. The largest change to our game came after Mrs Andrew’s asked if she could keep a copy of the game herself. We knew that we could not afford to give board games out too everyone, so we came up with a new way to distribute our game at no cost. Our board game BioMech is now online to download for free on our wiki here, with full printing instructions. This meant that our original target of making our game accessible to all UK students was a lot more realistic.
After testing the game at a couple of science conventions such as the Big Bang Fair South West and Britain Needs Scientists, we were give feedback to help us make some minor improvements. After this was complete, we began manufacturing the game. The unboxing of BioMech can be seen below:
This new version of the game was played by students from Colyton Grammar School. As part of our initiative to make BioMech accessible to as many GCSE students as possible we have began leaving copies of the game at schools free of charge, in order to benefit the education of synthetic biology for GCSE and A level students.
Despite the possible applications of synthetic biology and, as shown by the number of iGEM teams entering each year into the competition, the interest of both undergraduates, overgraduates and high school students for the subject is growing, there is very little synthetic biology education in the UK.
Currently there is no education of synthetic biology at the University of Exeter and there are very few synthetic biology courses and modules across the United Kingdom. However, we want to target this gap in education of synthetic biology at a university level.
In response to this, we have decided to create two new synthetic biology module for 2nd and 3rd year students at our university. In these modules we will give the students an introduction into the fundamentals of synthetic biology, covering topics such as plasmid design and construction, analytical techniques and DNA constructs and genome integration. We are having a large focus on biosafety and kill switches since we think this is a major issue in the field. Furthermore, we want to help the students to improve their research skills through a student led journal club that will be run by former iGEM students.
Over the summer we created a series of podcasts in the style of the BBC radio 4 programme ‘Desert Island Disks’. In this series we we interview academics and key public science figures, such as Prof. Jim Al-khalili, Prof, Richard Kitney, Dr. Lynn Rothschild and Prof. John Love, about synthetic biology and public engagement.
During the interview we ask 'if you were stuck on a desert island what...'
We also ask questions involving synethtic biology, scientific outreach, edcuation and about their work.
These podcasts aim to be entertaining, educational and easily accessible. Podcasts are a great way to reach a wider audience to educate them about synthetic biology and change any negative views of the topic. By featuring public science figures from a variety of disciplines, it will highlight the importance of different subjects in the interdisciplinary topic of synthetic biology. We hope this will inspire people from a range of backgrounds to learn about the subject. The podcasts are available to listen to on Youtube and SoundCloud for free for everyone.
In August we travelled to Westminster for the iGEM UK annual meet-up, an opportunity to meet other UK teams, discuss our ideas and projects and have a chance to practise our presentation in front of students and academics. Although our presentation was well received we were also given very important feedback, such as why we hadn’t incorporated biosafety into our game and our module. Since then we have rectified these issues.
Furthermore, we were given talks about the fundamentals of synthetic biology and also about conducting reliable surveys for our outreach. We also had the chance to set up a collaboration with Glasgow, and help out Warwick by directing them to schools and teams that they could collaborate with or mentor.
The Big Bang South West Science Fair was one of the first places we tested BioMech. Our stall at the fair focussed on introducing students and teachers to synthetic biology and gathering information on how people perceive synthetic biology. Students were aged between 8 and 18, and teachers from a large variety of schools from across the South West.
For the fair, we wanted to show visitors the disciplinary nature of synthetic biology. We displayed and discussed how physics, chemistry, biology and engineering can be used in synthetic biology. We created two leaflets: one which explained the basics of Synthetic Biology, and one which explained the iGEM competition. We created two companion powerpoint presentations to the leaflets which went in more depth, and played them on loop on two iPads on the stand. As well as this we premiered a very basic form of BioMech for students and teachers try out. One student told us:
BioMech is more fun than the card games I played at a card game convention in Birmingham
We also drew inspiration from the ‘Activities Booklet’ created by the William and Mary iGEM 2015 team. The sweetie DNA construction activity proved incredibly popular amongst the younger students and gave us an opportunity to talk to them about basic genetics as well as some synthetic biology ideas.
The second science fair was Britain Needs Scientists, hosted at the University of Exeter. This fair was aimed at students aged 16-18 who were interested in STEM careers. Here we focused on tying the STEM subjects into Synthetic Biology and were able to discuss more complex aspects of synthetic biology
Background: The fundamental reason for targeting equality and diversity within science, is that synthetic biology has the chance to be hierarchically and systematically equal from the beginning. If those working in the field can encourage the importance of diversity to the younger generations, then when synthetic biology becomes a well established and publicly recognised field of science, it has the possibility of being recognised for its progressive nature towards a gender, racial and socio-economical equality.
Using statistics gained from the Equality and Diversity office at the University of Exeter, and further statistics on gender inequality within the College of Life and Environmental Sciences (CLES) and the College of Engineering Mathematics and Physical Sciences (CEMPS) provided by Athena Swan, we want to highlight the problem with inequality and diversity to a wider audience.
We aim to achieve this by focusing on three distinct areas:
