Team:Concordia/HP/Gold
Integrating Pierrefonds Comprehensive High School's Suggestions
Through presenting to two Biology classes at Pierrefonds Comprehensive High school, we were able to reach out to a young group of individuals about our project. We had the chance to motivate them about pursuing a career in a scientific field, teach them a bit about synthetic biology, and educate them about the core elements of our project. Using their feedback, we were also able to incorporate their ideas into our experimental process.
During part of each presentation, our team presenters asked the students about their knowledge on nanoparticles and their diverse uses. Mainly though, the high school students were encouraged to imagine our ‘cell battle’ and describe what our ‘microgladiators’ could have as ‘nano-weapons’. We found that most of the answers to the last question about nanoparticle design revolved around ‘pointy nano-weapons,’ which led our synthesis team to search for a protocol which could generate the corresponding shaped nanoparticles. Finally, we synthesized gold nanotriangles through the use of the aloe vera plant extract, in addition to the spherical nanoparticles we had also synthesized. This was one of the ways in which we integrated the public’s suggestions into our project.
Establishing a Dialogue with our Community
In order to gain a broader collection of perspectives on our project, we wanted to complement the high school student feedback we gathered with that of university-level students with a scientific background. To do this we conducted interviews with Concordia University students at the Loyola campus. Through this, the Concordia University community had the opportunity to hear about our Combat Cells.
Many of the interviewed science students showed interest toward our project and we received much feedback from the community. They were mainly intrigued by the ‘cell battle’ idea and how we were going to achieve this. Since we received this feedback while we were still in the process of brainstorming ways to execute our project idea, we chose to design the scientific foundation of our work directly with consideration for the public’s perspectives.
In order to integrate the public’s suggestions, we interviewed several students on our campus. We started off by providing students with a description of the iGEM competition for those who hadn’t heard about it, followed by an overview of our project. Our interview questions included:
- Do you know what nanoparticles are?
- Can you guess what products have nanoparticles in them?
- Have you ever seen a nanoparticle warning label?
- What initiatives would you take if you were working with
Nanoparticles?
- If you were to design the cell battle, what kind of nanoparticles would you use (shape/element)?
As anticipated, their responses were similar to those we had obtained from the Pierrefonds Comprehensive High School Student interviews, with respect to generating ‘pointy nano-weapons.’ This further inspired us to generate gold nanotriangles with the use of aloe vera plant extract, as a way of integrating the public’s ideas into our work. Other responses to this question of nanoparticle shape were more imaginative, which demonstrated the interviewees enthusiasm toward this area of our project.
Provided below is Episode 2 of our webseries, which contains the student interviews.
Episode 2: Student Interviews
