Keeping in line with the principles of synthetic biology, we aimed to make our research accessible to all members of society through the development of a range of educational resources. Many of the misconceptions and skepticism of synthetic biology are the result of a lack of public understanding of the field, and the inability of researchers and industries to “initiate open discussions”. Our initial outreach activities involved the delivery of lessons and workshops for summer school students, and we drew upon the feedback from these activities to plan further outreach events and resources designed for a larger target audience. Equally, these activities enabled us to assess the level of knowledge that the public have about synthetic biology, and discover their opinions about this emerging research field and, more specifically, our project.

The design of our educational programmes were guided by the synthetic biology educational aims outlined by Kuddell et al (2007):

• Encourage students to precisely and carefully articulate their views
• Raise controversial issues and encourage debate
• Address the issues of security, safety and ownership
• Be realistic about what synthetic biology has the potential to do

  Summer Schools

  
  
  An important and accessible platform for increasing public knowledge is to educate school children, so we ran workshops at four summer schools in Oxford:
  • Northwest Science Network Summer School (16-17 year old students interested in a broad range of science subjects)
  • UNIQ (16-17 year old state school students interested in biochemistry)
  • Pembroke Science Summer School (16-17 year old students interested in different science subjects)
  • Oxford Summer Courses (13-16 year old international students)
    
    Our initial summer school classes were targeted at 16-17 year old students studying STEM subjects and with an interest in pursuing these subjects at university. Upon planning our educational resources for summer schools, we sought guidance from current teachers to ensure that the activities were tailored to the right level of understanding and delivered in an engaging format. We worked on developing activities that would appeal to the interests of a young audience, as well as making the activities as interactive as possible. We believed that it was important to ensure that the lessons involved low-resource activities that could be shared and used by teachers in schools, since this would enable the education of a wider cohort of school students. We also wanted to demonstrate that synthetic biology is an accessible field that all school students should feel able to pursue, and did not want to create artificial barriers by suggesting that synthetic biology could only be understood and accessed with specialist knowledge and equipment.
    
    The structure of our lesson plan involved a brief introduction where we explained the principles of synthetic biology, followed by a carousel of activities where small groups moved around the room to participate in different stations. Each station had a task with a specific learning objective to ensure that the teaching and discussions were structured and focused. We believed it was important to demonstrate the range of tasks involved in synthetic biology and iGEM, including workshops explaining the structure of proteins, the use of Snapgene, modelling and the assessment of ethical issues associated with synthetic biology.

Section 3

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