Team:Georgia State/STEM
STEM Camp
As part of our community outreach, and as a continuation from last years GSU iGEM ASL outreach, this year we hosted an event for a STEM camp specifically catered to local deaf and hard of hearing high school students. The students came from all over Georgia for a week long stay at GSU, with the main goal being exposure to various STEM related fields. iGEM GSU hosted one of their activities which spanned over the course of 2 days. The activity we decided on was DNA barcoding, which was both simple and representative of many of the techniques we use in lab.The 16 students paired off and each pair brought in a plant leaf of their choice. After teaching them the basics of DNA, they donned their lab coats and gloves and began the DNA extraction protocol. Despite being high school students, some as young as 14, they picked up lab techniques quickly, and by the end of day 1 the purified DNA was amplified in the thermocycler. Day 2 started early, the amplified DNA was loaded onto a gel and, after a brief fire drill interruption, the results were analyzed. Six out of eight teams got bands at about the right size, and those were sent off for sequencing. After sequencing, the results were compared to a DNA databank to determine the original plant species, and those final results were sent to the students.
This activity was as much of a learning experience for us as it was for the STEM camp students. Teaching biology and synthetic biology techniques is difficult enough, but adding in a language barrier, despite the translators best efforts, made everything more challenging. Some of the most challenging things of trying to teach deaf or hard of hearing students is the necessity to constantly stop or slow down. Much of the terminology we use daily in our lab either has an uncommon sign or no sign at all, and as a result translators would have to stop and spell out the entire word each time it was used in our instruction. For example, “gel electrophoresis” was a word that took the translators quite a while to sign out, causing the students to be forced to focus entirely on the translators during that time. This also meant that drawing things out or having images on the board didn’t work as well as we thought, forcing students to split their attention meant some words got lost. Additionally, as instructors, we were thrown off due to our inexperience teaching through interpreters. Despite the students attentiveness, and the translators proactiveness, it is extremely off putting to have nobody look at you in a lecture, despite them paying attention. At the end of the day the message got across and most of the experiments were a success. The students were very clearly willing to learn, and their efforts paid off.
Due to these results, groups 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, and 9’s DNA was sent off for sequencing so the students will be able to determine the plant species they were working with. Groups 1, 4, and 8 did not recover any DNA so their results are inconclusive.