Our team recognizes that the innovation of synthetic biology and science don’t emerge from just one source. Interdisciplinary work and collaborations play a huge part in the advancement of our field. This year, we developed an exciting new biology teaching tool, our Plasmid Learning Kit, to engage and support a new generation of synthetic biology students. In order to utilize different resources and gain insights that cannot simply be done by one team, we formed partnerships with other iGEM teams to produce the best Plasmid Learning Kit possible. By sending our Plasmid Learning Kits to other teams, we hope they were able to utilize them in new and innovative ways during their outreach and education events, and provide us with valuable feedback on how to improve this biology teaching tool.
Additionally, we pride ourselves on our independence and our ability to operate our organization as a high-performing team. We are approaching our seventh year as a team, and we realized that we’ve built up a lot of knowledge that we hoped to share with other iGEM teams. To this end, we helped provide advice to the iGEM team from WLC Milwaukee.
We sent our plasmid kit to two iGEM teams: Rice University and Florida State University. They were given instructions as well as extra parts to the kit. We wanted them to test our kit to see if it was helpful for teaching synthetic biology and to see what improvements we could make.
From Rice University, we heard mixed results. They found that it was helpful when introducing the concept of plasmids. It was a great visual aid as well as a hands-on activity for the children. It reinforced their learning and helped them retain it. However, they found issues with the quality of the kit. The magnets placed on the back were not large or strong enough, so the plasmid pieces fell off the board often. Also, the color scheme was a bit confusing. The restriction sites were different colors in order to indicate that they were different, but students seemed to think that only all the colors had to match -- the pink gene belonged with the pink restriction site.
In order to address these issues, more magnets could be placed on the back of each piece. As for the colors, better instructions could be written regarding the coloration or different shades of each color could be used to represent the different sites.
Florida State University also gave us many suggestions for improvements of the kit. The admired the aesthetics and bright colors of the different parts of the plasmid, and found that its maneuverability made it effective in teaching young scientists the value of synthetic biology, and surprisingly, in communicating certain concepts to experienced experts in fields of life sciences. We saw the usefulness of our plasmid kit not just as a flexible educational tool, but also as a icebreaker for communication many different groups of people. They had constructive feedback on how we needed to clarify the instructions manual that accompanied the kit, as it was not clear at first how the magnets should be oriented and the plasmid kit assembled at first glance. We were overjoyed when we heard that FSU iGEM ran with our kit, building on it with their own innovative educational ideas.
We plan to use the feedback we’ve collected from our friends at Rice University iGEM and Florida State University iGEM to improve and expand our plasmid kit for the future. We’ve already begun to incorporate some of the feedback we’ve gotten from other teams such as including stronger magnets and clearer instructions. When we began this project, the goal wasn’t to build a tool and use it for a year; rather, we plan to perfect the model to maximize learning outcomes. Our collaborations with Rice and Florida State allowed us to expand the scope of our outreach and public engagement. As scientists, the burden falls on us to not only make great innovations now, but also enable a future where great innovations can continue to happen. We believe education is key, and that our plasmid kit is a powerful tool in helping us to accomplish that mission.
We first met Jack from WLC Milwaukee’s iGEM team through a chance meeting at Cornell, as we happened to be presenting at the same symposium as him. He introduced himself as a member of WLC Milwaukee’s iGEM team, and we quickly got to know each other. We worked with WLC Milwaukee to share some of the knowledge we’ve built up about iGEM, and what makes an iGEM team successful. Our conversation centered on team organization and practices that have helped us grow as a group. We wish them the best of luck at the 2018 iGEM Giant Jamboree!