Team:Nottingham/Public Engagement

Overview

Welcome to the Nottingham iGEM 2018 Public Engagement page. Public Engagement and outreach is fundamentally the communication between fellow scientists and non-scientists.
Nottingham iGEM 2018 participated in the University of Nottingham Discovery Day an open day for young children and parents. This was our first Public Engagement event and it helped the team establish a dialogue with members of the public.

We also held workshops at 3 schools with students ages 15-18. They engaged strongly and positively with the activities and showed ample curiosity towards synthetic biology. Not only did this open a new avenue but it helped us understand just how much students knew about synthetic biology and different components of our project, we hope this can be developed further for future curriculums that will be taught in schools.

Finally, we published articles for local newspapers describing what possibilities our project could bring, as well as encouraging readers to engage with us.

Discovery day

16th June 2018

Nottingham iGEM took part in Discovery Day 2018 at the University of Nottingham! We put on a range of fun activities for kids aged 4-10 to learn more about synthetic biology and bacteria microbes!

First, the children got the opportunity to make their own plasticine microbes and put them in petri dishes! They used inspiration from our fun cuddly toy bacterium friends and produced some amazing results.

After that, both kids and adults had a go at guessing which mode of transport had the most bacteria- bus, train or plane. The answer- bus surprised a lot of people- including the adults!

Finally, everyone had a go at seeing how much bacteria was on their hands by using a special gel, then showing their hands under UV light to see how dirty their hands were. It seems that the kids had cleaner hands than most of us university students!

Overall it was an amazing day where we educated kids all about synthetic biology! The parents feedback to our team was incredibly posititve and the kids loved the activites. This was our first outreach activity and we think it was a massive success at engaging kids with iGEM and synthetic biology at such a young age!

School workshops

The Nottingham iGEM team visited 3 local Nottinghamshire schools; The Becket School on the 28th September to hold a workshop to a group of 30 year 11 (ages 15-16) students. On the 8th October we also visited 14, year 13 (ages 17-18) students at the Nottingham University Academy of Science and Technology (NUAST). Finally on the 11th October we visited 15, year 12 students (ages 16- 17) at Bluecoat Academy.

We split our workshop programme into 3 parts: 1) A presentation, 2) DNA extraction from fruit and 3) Research and presentations by the students. We organised it in such a way that it was representative of a typical university course. The presentation represented lectures, the extraction represented laboratory practicals and the research and presentation represented seminars.

We gave a 15-minute presentation titled ‘An introduction to synthetic biology’ in which we introduced synthetic biology concepts and talked about iGEM and our project. We invited them to ask questions throughout the presentation and after it concluded, and we were pleasantly surprised by how much the students were engaged and the knowledge they previously had. In addition to questions about our presentation. They asked us questions about the university life and about what options they were considering for their A-levels and Universities. It was inspiring to speak to a group of students who were thinking of pursuing higher education and perhaps, becoming future researchers themselves.

After the presentation, we invited the students to extract DNA from strawberries and encouraged them to use their knowledge from their classes to understand why each step was necessary. For example, we explained why detergent and salt were needed in the extraction and why ethanol was used. The students thoroughly enjoyed the demonstration and had positive reactions when watching DNA precipitate. At the end of the experiment, students raised their hands and asked what the purpose of DNA extraction was in the ‘real world’. Using the example of the ever-popular DNA testing for ancestry and ethnicity, we told them of the importance of getting DNA samples to test for similarities between individuals. We also talked about its importance in genome wide studies for human disease and major projects such as the Human Genome Project.

Finally, we produced a list of titles for the students to choose from in order to research and present the rest of the class. We critiqued their research quality, information on slides and how they presented. We used titles from coursework given to us as part of our course from the previous academic year and showed them the quality of work expected at university. We hoped that they would come away from the workshop knowing what to expect from their A-levels and subsequent university courses.

At the end of the session, the students completed a feedback questionnaire which yielded useful information about how much students already know about synthetic biology. Most students enjoyed the workshop and said that they learnt about new subject topics. Unfortunately, we weren’t able to hold full day workshops which would have helped the students better grasp some complex topics. This comes directly from the students who told us that the concepts were a little complicated and perhaps they would have like more time to learn more about synthetic biology and bacteriophages.

We found it interesting (but not surprising) that the majority of students had not heard of Clostridium difficile or Clostridium difficile infection before the workshop. As we explained in the workshop, it mostly affects elderly people, those who are staying in hospitals for long periods of times or those who are immunocompromised. Therefore, it was unsurprising that the students hadn’t heard of a disease that doesn’t affect their demographic.

Most students across the 3 schools also had not heard much about bacteriophage or phage therapy except for the few who were personally interested in genetic modification. So when asked whether they would consider receiving phage therapy, more than half of the students responded ‘maybe’. The students didn’t elaborate on their answer so can only speculate but we think that the idea of using a virus (something that we are taught at school as being bad for us) as a therapy is a little daunting. Some students wrote that they would consider it if it was being used to treat a major illness or if it was a last choice treatment. This ties in with their opinions on antibiotic resistance- most students responded that they were aware of antibiotic resistance problem but most said that they were ‘a little’ worried about resistance compared to those who responded ‘a lot’. We explained that our treatment was to be provided as an alternative to antibiotics so if the students weren’t too worried about antibiotics, there would be no need to consider alternative treatment.

Another possible reason as to the apprehension on receiving phage therapy could be again due to not fully understanding what phage therapy entails since the workshops were only run from an hour to 100 minutes. In the future, perhaps this is something which could be developed further and incorporate into the teaching national curriculum. For this reason (and the responses we received from the discussion groups), we created a phage therapy leaflet that will be given to those receiving the treatment.

We asked the students to rank the top 3 situations in which genetically modified organisms can be used, if at all. Across all 3 schools, the most popular choice was to make medicinal products followed by reducing environmental contaminants or purifying water from contaminants. This is a possible reflection of school curriculum (because the answers between all 3 schools were similar) or personal interest. When speaking to the students, some were interesting in going into a healthcare related degree at university or human-based biology. However, this doesn’t detract from the fact that the students were environmentally conscious.

Lastly, we asked the students what words they associated with synthetic biology and the words ‘engineering’, ‘DNA’, ‘biology’, ‘synthetic’ and ‘modification’ or ‘modifying’ were the most used. The purpose of the word clouds was to see what emotions they associated with synthetic biology, be it positive or negative emotions. From the most popular words used, the students did not seem to feel strongly either way about synthetic biology and rather opted for more neutral words. Some students used the words ‘innovative’, ‘technical’ or ‘cool’ but they also found it a bit ‘complicated’ or ‘confusing’.

Attached are the data from the questionnaires filled in. The questionnaires are completely anonymous.

Questionnaire data