Human Practices - Silver Award
Education
BioMech
Synthetic Biology is severely under-taught at all stages of education, occasionally certain syllabi will lightly touch on certain concepts, but only to briefly move on without any real depth into the topic. One of the aims of our human practises is to address this by providing easily accessible synthetic biology learning resources such as a board game, open to teachers and students alike. This lack of focus on synthetic biology is not only seen in lower levels of education, but further up the age ladder at university. Very few universities offer modules in specifically synthetic biology which is why we have taken steps to implement a module in our own university.
BioMech is an educational synthetic biology board game, designed by the 2016 Exeter iGEM team for students aged 14-18. The concept of the board game was developed early on in the project, with the design informed by a year 10 work experience student. The board game was then tested with GCSE students from two schools, the feedback from which was used to tailor the game around the current knowledge of year 10 students. The intention is to introduce the concept of synthetic biology to a younger age group in a fun and engaging manner. In order to make the game widely accessible despite needing a physical copy BioMech has been uploaded to our wiki, and is able to download with printing instructions for free. We hope that BioMech will inspire students to further their own education independently given that there is currently very little taught on the topic prior to university level.
You can read more about BioMech here.
Synthetic Biology Module
Continuing with the theme of responding to a lack of education in synthetic biology, we also looked at university level education. Due to the lack of any type of formal synthetic biology teaching here at the University of Exeter, we have created a second year synthetic biology module to implement in the Biosciences department. During the design process we managed to talk to multiple academics about their thoughts on the process of implementing new modules into the syllabus, and how it could be made more efficient in the future. It will be available for second year Biosciences and Natural Sciences students to take from September 2017.
You can read more about the module here.
Public Perception
Desert Island... Science?
‘Desert Island… Science?’ is an interview series hosted on our YouTube channel and wiki, in which we spoke to a variety of academics and leading figures in science, and often more specifically, in synthetic biology. It is inspired by the similarly named ‘Desert Island Discs’ on BBC channel 4, and mixes fun, light questions with more interesting, complicated enquiries into their work, their opinions on topics like equality in science and need for education, etc.
The intention of ‘Desert Island… Science?’ is to humanise academics and experts to the public in light of the current anti-expert sentiment, and make the work of scientist more accessible and engaging to people not involved in the field. Whilst we recognise the perception of synthetic biology has improved greatly since several years ago, there is often still negativity and confusion associated with the general perception of the field, which is something we hope to negate by showing the positive impacts and implications of synthetic through our interviews.
You can read more about ‘Desert Island… Science?’ here.
Public Outreach
The Big Bang South West science fair was the first science fair we attended, falling on 29th June 2016. It was aimed towards students of all ages, teachers and parents, and allowed to get a range of feedback on our board game, BioMech, which first premiered there. We also engaged students present with activities from William and Mary’s 2015 activities booklet, using the gene bracelet and sweetie DNA activities to grab attention and open dialogue, both of which worked effectively. We believed that the activities booklet supplemented our intentions of presenting synthetic biology in a friendly manner perfectly.
The Britain Needs Scientists fair was a much smaller fair we attended on 6th July 2016, aimed primarily at A Level students looking at doing a degree in a science. Our primary focus here was highlighting synthetic biology as a multi-disciplinary subject, and engage in more challenging conversations with interested students. Due to the name; synthetic biology an assumption is quickly made that it is heavily biology based, when in fact is contains aspect of all STEM subjects.
You can read more about our science fair visits here.
