Team:Tacoma RAINmakers

Team:ECUST/Lab/Notebook

The Tacoma RAINMakers hosted a one week bioengineering camp this summer. Aided by Graduate Tacoma, a program raising graduation rates in the Tacoma area, the RAINmakers joined forces with RAIN to introduce incoming ninth and tenth graders to synthetic biology. These students came from many schools in the Tacoma Area. The team specifically targeted public schools for students who did not have the ability to go to science camp or to do hands-on learning. This free camp educated students who did not have these opportunities either in the classrooms or outside. The group of students was diverse in socio-economic class, ethnicity, and background knowledge. Many of the students were ninth graders who had not yet taken a biology class, while some had succeeded in biology and were pursuing research outside the classroom. On a pre-test, when asked about group work, many of the students ranked their enjoyment of the activity quite low. However, at the end of the camp on the same test, the average ranking of group work was higher. The exposure to the lab in groups created a friendly atmosphere where the campers worked together to solve problems and were not intimidated to ask for help from their instructors, the RAINMakers iGEM team. One student wrote “the iGEM team was very helpful because they were around [the camper’s] age.” The instructors taught everything from micro pipetting to the basics of PCR. Along with lab work, the camp also hosted multiple guest speakers, including Mr. Josh Haney, a biochemist who spoke about biofuels; Dr. David Hirschberg, who is the RAINMakers’ PI and spoke about wearable technology; and Dr. Jutta Heller, a professor at University of Washington Tacoma and spoke about the human genome.

The iGEM team prepared experiments for campers to teach younger generations about science. Beginning with a briefing on lab safety, the campers then headed to the lab. The first day they learned how to load gels, later doing a crime scene lab with gel electrophoresis. The next day, campers analyzed their own cheek cells, along with plant and bacteria cells. This was followed by extracting DNA from cheek cells, putting it into a 1.5 mL tube, and attaching a string to create a DNA necklace. After this, the students pipetted a dye and protein into a 96 well plate to create colorful designs. The next day, the campers ran PCR, learned how to make gels, and used their previously acquired skills to load the PCR into the wells of the gel. The day after this, the campers tested to see whether or not they were supertasters using PTC strips, and three out of the fifteen were! After tasting PTC, the campers moved back to the lab and prepared bacteria cultures, which they later loaded isoamyl alcohol into, causing the solution to smell like bananas. Focusing on food science, the campers then tried Miracle Berry tablets, tasting an array of foods and writing down their observations. The feedback was extremely positive, and many campers explained to their parents the science behind the Miracle Berries the next day at the Bioengineering Camp Reception.

Students got the chance to give feedback by filling out a questionnaire, the same one that housed a pre-test they took at the start of camp. The average score when answering questions about bioengineering, such as defining techniques and comparing cell types improved from 30% to 92%. When asked about a particular lab activity that stood out or was valuable to the students’ learning, one wrote “the PCR lab was the best lab activity because [she] felt it best summed up the purposes of bioengineering”. Her favorite lesson, however, was bioethics because “it truly revealed that some questions do not have a right or wrong answer.” Many students felt the same way, and as the team invited them to explore controversial topics, students were able to voice their opinions. When asked about whether or not the camp ignited any curiosity or interest for them in topics of bioengineering, biotechnology, genetic engineering, and/or synthetic biology, another student wrote “after [the camp, they] would like to do more research on genetic engineering and synthetic biology,” and another wrote “the camp made [them] more curious about genetic engineering, and maybe [after] more research, [they] would consider it in [their] future.”  A trend among the written feedback reports was that the students enjoyed working in the lab and participating in activities unavailable to them in a school setting. Along with this, a majority of the students wrote that the camp sparked an interest in bioengineering and they would like to pursue research in synthetic biology in the future.