Team:IISc-Bangalore/EC Education
Prologue - Designing educational materials
Many might be of the opinion that the greatest hurdle in education is the lack of good teachers or old-fashioned curricula. While there is substantial truth in that statement, the biggest hurdle in education mostly comes from the lack of adequate resources for the learners. In a recent paper, Boakye and Ampiah, while studying newly qualified teachers (NQTs) find that the greatest challenge on which all of them agreed unambiguously is "lack of teaching and learning resources".
While trying to educate people of varied interests about synthetic biology, our team therefore found it imperative to invest significant amount of time and resources in designing educational materials suited to a diverse audience. The impediments in education caused by lack of adequate resources are even greater in the nascent field of synthetic biology.
To adopt a systematic and rational approach for the design of educational materials, we decided to follow the Principle of Universal Design for Learning (UDL). It is imperative to examine the theories for instructional design in this context. The three learning theories for instructional design are summarised in the schematic below:
The behavioural approach is much more effective in helping learners master the content of their profession (knowing what) and where learners bring almost no prior knowledge to learning. On the other hand, the cognitive approach can effectively help learners solve problems in unfamiliar situations (knowing how) as this theory is usually considered more appropriate for explaining complex forms of learning (reasoning, problem solving, etc). As for the constructivist approach, experts have effectively applied it when dealing with ill-defined problems that calls for reflection-in-action.
To decide on the kind of educational materials that we sought to produce, we decided to prioritise the values of our Outreach activities. We decided to adopt the constructivist and cognitivist approaches, so as to encourage the learners master the ability to critically think and solve problems with the tools of SynBio, and simultaneously reflect on their plan of action and its impacts. While we have primarily focussed on these two learning theories for instructional design, we recognize the immense importance of the behavioural approach as well, so as to meaningfully contribute to the society by constructing something tangible using the principles of SynBio.
Based on the principles of instructional design, educationists have come up with detailed theories for the same. The most popular theories of instructional design are -
- Situated cognition theory, which posits that knowing is inseparable from doing
- The Sociocultural Learning Theory, which is based upon the idea that a learner's environment (involving three key themes - culture, language and "zone of proximal development") plays a pivotal role in the learner's development
- The ADDIE model, which has five phases-Analysis, Design, Development, Implementation, and Evaluation, representing a dynamic, flexible guideline for building effective training and performance support tools.
- Merrill's Principles of Instruction, which is a problem-based theory based on the premise that the principles of activation, demonstration, application and integration are necessary to the success of a learner
- Bloom's taxonomy of learning, which is a set of three hierarchical models used to classify learning objectives into levels of complexity and specificity.
We analysed the forte and the pitfalls of the various theories of instructional design to understand which one would be best suited to our requirements. Since learning has been largely proven to be individual specific, we restricted ourselves from using fixed prototypes like the ADDIE model. We thus based our educational initiatives on situated cognition, sociocultural learning, Merrill's Principle and Bloom's taxonomy.
While the theories stated above are largely focussed on helping us understand instructional design and decide the educational content, the real implementation of these ideas need more refinement that what has been already discussed. To aid in the real implementation of the instructional design theories and create an inclusive learning environment, we have tried to conform to the Principles of Universal Design for Learning (UDL). UDL is an educational framework, first defined by David Rose, based on research in the learning sciences, including cognitive neuroscience, that guides the development of flexible learning environments and learning spaces that can accommodate individual learning differences. UDL is focussed on three primary goals -
- Providing multiple means of engagement
- Providing multiple means of representation
- Providing multiple means of action and expression
With these ideas of instructional design in our minds, we tried to produce educational materials and reach out to people of various diverse backgrounds and inspire them to contribute to the growing field of synthetic biology.
This page is focussed mainly on our attempts to create materials to encourage the public to contribute to SynBio. The details of the efforts where we mainly engaged in a dialogue with members of the public and from various other fields have been enlisted on our Communications page.
Open Day 2020: SynBio Game, Agar Art and Collection of feedback
The Open Day in IISc is the day when everyone is allowed inside the institute and all the different departments setup exhibits or games related to science. The purpose behind this is to encourage scientific temper among the general populace. 28th February is celebrated as National Science Day, to monumentalise and commemorates the anniversary of the discovery of the Raman Effect which was discovered by Sir C V Raman, a former director of our institute. On the occasion of National Science Day (28th February) and Founder's Day (3rd March), the Institute opens its doors to the general public showcasing the various scientific activities being pursued in our institution.
On Open Day, our iGEM team setup a stall to popularise synthetic biology and communicate the science behind our project.
In the stall, we had an Agar Art exhibit, where we showed different drawings that can be made by streaking bacteria onto the Agar plates. The original agar artist was Alexander Flemming! We found Agar Art to be a powerful tool to communicate scientific concept of culturing microbes. One of the objectives was to convey the importance of the being able to culture microbes. Being able to culture microbes enables people to study them and gain better insights on the mode of functionality of the organism. We were able to show that we can culture bacteria on fixed regions and bacterial culturing, an essential microbiology skill, is also an opportunity to express your artistic inclination.
The other stall setup by the iGEM team devised a game to communicate the concept of BioBricks to the general public, particularly students. The objective was to convey that different parts are required to make a composite object.
The rules of the game were each participant got two minutes to joining words written on puzzle pieces that need to be connected to convey a theme. The puzzle pieces had the following words:
- Ice-creams, Papaya, Apple, Grapes and Banana - Components of a Fruit Salad
- Fishes, Algae, Soil, Water, and Frogs - Components of a Pond
- Planets, Stars, Black holes, Moons, and Astronauts -Things Found in Space
- Cheese, Bun, Patty, Cucumber, and Tomato - Components of A Burger
- Seat, Wheel, Handle, Chain, and Pedal - Components of A Bicycle
- Steering Wheel, Engine, Headlights, Wheel, and Window - Components of A Car
- Window, Ceiling, Floor, Walls, and Tubelight - Components of A Room
- Trees, Monkeys, Birds, Insects and Soil - Abiotic and Biotic Elements Found in Forest
- Blackboard, Teacher, Student, Books and Playground - Components of A School
- Trees, See-Saw, Swings, Slides, and Monkey-Bars - Thing You Find In A Park
BioBricks are nothing but tiny components that can assembled together to generate a larger synthetic biology circuit. By comparing BioBricks to components of commonly used composite objects such as a Burger, we attempt to develop an intuitive understanding of BioBricks. As you can see from the above list, we had common elements that can be used in the formation of more than one composite object. The idea behind this was to emphasis the modularity of BioBricks.
After the participants completed generating as many blocks of words as they could in the given time, they were rewarded with informational bookmarks in accordance to their performance. We also explained the ideology behind the game and the connect to the concept of BioBricks.
In the third and the last exhibit put up by our team, we shared the ideas of the past iGEM Teams of IISc and the project idea our team was currently working on this year. We established the premise of our project by informing them about the menace caused by the problem the team hoped to tackle. We proposed our solution to the problem and then encouraged the audience to share their opinions and thoughts on our projects.
We were enlightened about the looming fear around the idea of synthetically modified biological products and organisms. We engaged in conversation with several visitors of our stalls attempting to convey the marvels of synthetic biology while strongly emphasising on the various safety steps taken while genetically engineering products or organisms. Many individuals were unaware of the use of synthetic biology in the production of genetically modified crops, while others expressed their concerns regarding GMO crops. We discussed the role played by genetically modified crops in helping India becoming a self-sufficient country in terms of its agricultural demands and help reach its current agricultural productivity.
In more than one way, the Open Day experience opened our eyes to the damage done, by smear campaigns on GMOs, to the public opinion and interest in synthetic biology. As novice synthetic biologists, we wanted to do our part in help disperse the irrational fears and unscientific misconceptions wrongly associated with synthetic biology. The Open Day interactions motivated us to pursue further modes of science communication.
In the end, we collected feedback from all the people who came to our exhibits. We strongly believe that science communication is just as much about hearing from the general public as it is about talking about the science. The feedback we received helped us understand how far we were able to succeed with respect to our efforts and enabled to better focus our ideas for future initiatives.
This educational initiative of ours conforms to several of the goals of theories of instructional design which we wanted to implement. First, this play-based learning of the concept of BioBricks where children themselves join small components related to a larger unit of hierarchy conforms to the constructivist and cognitivist approaches of learning. Furthermore, 'learning by doing', exemplified here through 'learning by playing' is in sync with the situated cognition theory. By referring to everyday objects around the child, we have tried to conform to the principle of 'cognition in context of environment', which is the basis of the sociocultural learning theory. Last, but not the least, we have tried to provide multiple means of expression and engagement for the students in learning about synthetic biology and genetic engineering. These principles of UDL have been duly integrated into our project by keeping agar art and a game as different means of engagement. While playful students could learn about the concepts through the game, there were many motivated students who connected better with agar art and microbial cultures instead of the more playful BioBricks game. We also ensured the active participation of the learners in the process by keeping the option of feedback and by answering any questions that they had. This new game developed by us also fulfils the learning objectives of the sensory (i.e., psychomotor) domain according to Bloom's taxonomy of education.
Rewiring Life: A Beginner's Guide (SynBio Primer)
The members of the team wrote an illustrated book titled Rewiring Life: A Beginners Guide introducing the field of synthetic biology so that it can be used to deliver various concepts in an understandable and fun manner. Right from the introduction of synthetic biology to its different applications, this book covers it all! The book is about 220 pages long and is current under review by IISc Press. The book was intended for middle school and high school students right from 6th grade to 12th grade.
Our Objective Behind Writing the Book:
The members of the team wrote an illustrated book titled "Rewiring Life: A Beginner's Guide" introducing the field of synthetic biology so that it can be used to deliver various concepts in an understandable and fun manner. Right from the introduction of synthetic biology to its different applications, this book covers it all!
What was our motivation behind writing this primer? Synthetic biology is a fast-growing, interdisciplinary field of biology that is concerned with the design and creation of new biological parts, systems and pathways and the re-design of existing natural biological systems for purposes useful to humankind. Rapid strides in this nascent field of research over the past decade have broadened tremendously our perspectives of biology and are heralding the next scientific revolution - be it the creation of living forms from simple biomolecules or rewiring a cell's metabolic factory. Despite these rapid advances in synthetic biology all over the globe, the field has been somewhat lacking pace in India. The number of research labs actively working on this in our country is miniscule compared to that in other countries like the US and China. To further the nation's scientific progress and to ensure that we keep pace with the developments around the world, India needs to train the next generation of scientists with the basic knowledge of synthetic biology and inspire them to explore deeper into the subject.
To further the nation's scientific progress and to ensure that we keep pace with the developments around the world, India needs to train the next generation of scientists with the basic knowledge of synthetic biology and inspire them to explore deeper into the subject.
Through this book, we intend to explain the basic principles of synthetic biology, starting right from the fundamentals of genetic engineering and molecular biology and building up to the most recent advances in the field. The book is dedicated to middle-school students, who are not previously exposed to the fundamental conceptual basis of these areas. We have built all the basic principles from scratch, and special focus has been given to keep the book as interactive as possible. Illustrations, comic strips, snippets on various discoverers in these areas and lucid explanations based on innumerable hand-picked examples are hallmarks of the book. We are unaware of the publication of any such simple-yet-exhaustive book on SynBio dedicated to middle and high school students till date, not just in India but all over the globe. We hope that this book will inspire at least a few, if not many readers to explore the topics in greater detail and consider pursuing a career in synthetic biology.
While surfing through the Internet, we realised that there is no proper primer of synthetic biology or genetic engineering available in the market. The only general books on the subject (i.e., not including research monographs) are dedicated to advanced undergraduates or post-graduates. This book differs from all of them in lucidly yet exhaustively conveying the fundamental concepts needed for the subject, finally attaining a climax in the discussion on the recent advances of synthetic biology. This book is unique in the fact that it is a standalone book and assumes no prerequisite knowledge on the part of the reader, except basic biological theories like the cell doctrine.
Table of Contents:
- Fundamentals of Microscopy
- Glimpses into the world of little beings
- Essentials of Molecular Biology
- Floating Toolkits: Plasmids
- The foot-soldiers of life - Proteins
- A dive into the annals of biotechnology
- Making hybrids - Recombinant DNA Technology
- Transformers - The Cooler Kind
- Let's amplify: The PCR Saga
- From bench to bedside - Downstream Processing
- Biotech in Action: Insulin Production
- Biotech in Action: Monoclonal Antibodies and Nanobodies
- Biotechnology Today: The Saga Continues
- Synthetic Biology: A World of Wonders
- Look before you leap: Bioethics and Biosafety
Through the above 15 chapters, we attempted to provide a reference guide that only tried to explain concepts but also elucidated the applications of these concepts in solving real world problems. Instead of keeping it limited to a soft copy, we have focussed on getting the book published. This is because in countries like India, accessibility is a major issue to online learning.
We thus tried to contact the IISc Press, the official publication wing of our institute. We were helped by Prof. Balaji R. Jagirdar, Prof. Dipshikha Chakravortty and Prof. Kaushal Verma in this regard. After completing all necessary formalities, we submitted this 220-page book to the IISc Press, who have kindly accepted the proposal. The book is currently being reviewed. The book is intended for middle school and high school students right from 6th grade to 12th grade.
By ensuring resources for publication of the book and the availability at a low cost, we have ensured that the largest number of students benefit from this initiative. In the spirit of Open Science, the authors shall also not take any royalty for this publication.
To popularize this book amongst schoolgoers, we intend to 'start small and then go big' by first approaching schools in and around Bengaluru to adopt it as a part of the curriculum. We also have plans to expand the reach of this primer by integrating it as part of the syllabus for schools all over the state and across the nation. In this context, We would like to involve various government and non-government organizations to help us be able to reach a larger number of schools and students and suggest necessary changes to customize the book as per their curricular requirements.
The book has been designed to be as reader-friendly as possible. We have strictly adhered to the principles of UDL by ensuring that the book is suited for a wide range of students, who can follow it at their own pace. While we have included more advanced and recent developments (like nanobodies) in the text, we have demarcated these sections so that those who wish to skip these portions can do so, without any inconvenience. We also wish to record it as an audiobook in future to ensure that it is accessible to the visually challenged students. The book is replete with URLs and other references so that the interested students can read more about specific topics which excite them. The content of the book is also aimed at being as inclusive and engaging for the children as possible. Graphics and illustrations (often with a comic touch) have been used throughout the book to grasp the attention of young readers.
Synthetic Biology Symposium
We organized a Synthetic Biology Symposium, named "SYNBYTE" on the 21st and 22nd of August 2021. Among the speakers invited to speak at the symposium were synthetic biologists from all over the globe:
- Prof. Marileen Dogterom, TU Delft
- Prof. Abhishek Chatterjee, Dept. Of Chemistry, Boston College.
- Dr. Swaminath Srinivas, Program Director for Gingko Bioworks
- Prof. Steven Benner, Distinguished Fellow, Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution (FAME).
- Prof. Pawan K Dhar, School of biotechnology, JNU
- Prof. Beatrix Sues, Dept. Of Biology, TU Darmstadt
Our objective behind organising this symposium was to bring the synthetic biology scientific community to the general public and our fellow iGEMers. Through the means of the symposium, we wanted the general public engage with synthetic biology and appreciate the versatility of synthetic biology applications.
We took care to represent the voices and opinions of a diverse set of extremely talented and skilled individuals in Synthetic Biology, from all over the world and from both academia and industry, to understand and give other people the opportunity to hear about multiple perspective of synthetic biology. We were also conscious to ensure gender equity in the panel of speakers.
Professor Nagasuma Chandra in the inauguration talked about the importance of synthetic biology and its role in addressing social challenges. In-silico biology hand in hand with synthetic biology can trigger the next biological revolution. She emphasised on the role played iGEM in this revolution and how iGEM enables the synthetic biology community to come together and deliver innovative solutions tackling societal problems. She echoed our sentiments regarding the organisation of the symposium wherein we hoped to communicate the foundations in the field of synthetic biology in a holistic manner.
Not only did the various individuals share the story of their science with the audience but engaged with members of academia in the audience regarding future research directions and engaged with the general public regarding the practical translation of their science during the moderated question and answer sessions. Many students and researchers from across the length and breadth of India participated in this symposium. We were delighted at being able to provide a platform for the interaction of these students with eminent synthetic biologists, and we believe that this is a positive contribution to the SynBio educational landscape in India.
Audiobook
Apart from our primer, we also prepared a short audiobook wherein we hoped to communicate the relevance of our project to the global community without getting into too many technical details.
We realised while working on a synthetic biology primer that through the primer we hoped to communicate concepts, but we still hadn't addressed why we choose this problem and how it affect so many people across the country.
The script of the audiobook is attached below.
To summarise the storyline, the protagonist is a student and the son of a farmer, he and several other students suffer from organophosphate poisoning due to runoff water from the agricultural fields polluting their water source. After highlighting the problem, we proceed to propose our plan to tackle organophosphate pollution and how today the problem we are addressing is that of organophosphate but tomorrow with minimal modifications, our system can be adapted for another pollutant.
The audio file of the audiobook in English is can downloaded below:
The importance of story-centric mode of educational material has been highlighted since quite some time back by educationists. Our audiobook recognizes the differences of individuals and caters to the need of learners who find auditory modes of learning more convenient. Above all, this audiobook also caters to the learning needs of the visually challenged, thereby reiterating our commitment to the UDL. We are currently working on translating the audiobook to various Indian languages to improve accessibility.
Talk to a Scientist
Talk To A Scientist is a weekly webinar series organized for children aged 6-16 years. In every webinar of these series, a scientist is invited to tell the children about some topic or concept in science. Talk to A Scientist is funded by the first ever IndiaBioscience Outreach grant and is an one of kind programme for science outreach and education in India. Started amidst the pandemic by Dr Karishma and Kaushik and Snehal Kadam, we believed that TTAS was the best platform to reach a diverse population of the young minds of India and engage in conversation with them about the wonders of synthetic biology. We reached out to the TTAS Team and they were kind enough to host for an hour interactive talk as part of their ongoing season. We were thrilled about this opportunity and prepared a set of slides in accordance to the format suggested by the TTAS organisers.
The session titled "Talk To A Biologist About Synthetic Biology" happened on 28th August 2021. In the session we covered the following topics
- The idea of what is life based on PICERAS and the comparison of living organisms to engineered products.
- The design principle behind life and how they can be used in synthetic biology.
- Construction of cells from basic biomolecules.
- Designing Cells to Obtained Desired Products.
The questions we wanted the young minds to think about were:-
- Can scientists design life and make customized living organisms to solve global problems?
- Can a cell be constructed from scratch using just basic biomolecules?
- How can you design cells to make them produce what you want?
- Is a living organism different from an engineered product, like say a radio?
We conclude the session by talking about our iGEM project. The problem caused by the rampant usage of organophosphates and how we propose to tackle this problem. The young minds who attended the session seem to have greatly enjoyed the session. Their questions amazed us and their infectious excitement for our project greatly invigorated us.
We prepared slides to introduce synthetic biology to school children between the age of 6-12 years and have made them publicly available. These slides were designed with the ideology of being able to introduce synthetic biology to school children. We are currently awaiting feedback from various users.
For the purpose of TTAS presentation, as always, we conformed to the principles of UDL, which have been a guiding light for all our activities. We have paused in between our presentation repeatedly for questions and engaged the children by asking them simple questions to answer in a mode of their choice (either by saying out loud or by typing). Multiplicity of modes of expression and action was ensured throughout the presentation. Furthermore, to inspire the next gen scientists, we had decided to follow a constructivist approach. Although there was skepticism within our team about the usage of abstract concepts of definition of life to invoke the appropriate context for SynBio, we finally decided to adopt this approach to let the creativity of the young minds be unbounded and to let their ideas flow free. With detailed explanations and appropriate examples picked from the children's socio-cultural context, our constructivist approach to pedagogy seemed to have been largely successful (as gauged from the questions posed by the audience in the Q-n-A session).
Project promotion video in multiple languages
As part of the required iGEM deliverables, we created a short video to promote our project. Our motivation to record the project promotion videos in different languages arose from a phone call one of our team members made to their family back home. We realised the importance in communicating our science in the native languages of the beneficiary of our projects. About half of India's population relies on agriculture and many million people use pesticides. In order to truly communicate how our team plans to tackle the menace caused by organophosphate pesticide usage, we realised the necessity for us to produce linguistic diverse content. Besides English, the video was recorded in 6 different Indian languages - Hindi, Odia, Bengali, Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil, along with the subtitles for all these videos. This was to help our project reach the different corners of our country, India, known for its huge linguistic diversity. According to the 2011 Census of India, 43.63% of our country's population are native speakers of Hindi. The language with the next greatest number of native speakers was Bengali, 8.03% of our country. We were attempting to record our project promotion video in the 10 languages with the highest proportion of native speakers. We especially wanted to record the video in Tamil, Kannada, Malayalam and Odiya in order to reach as many people as possible. Other language native speakers also are fluent in Hindi or Bengali or English. Kannada holds an especially important place owing to our institution being present in the state of Karnataka where the local language is Kannada. The other languages with high proportion of native speakers were Marathi, Telugu, Gujarati and Urdu. We were unfortunately not able to find translators located on campus to help us record the video in these regional languages within the deadline due to remote classes and work being preferred and suggested as much as possible, due to the COVID-19 pandemic. We have been working on getting our science translated into these languages. Additionally we are also trying to record the project promotion video in Assamese and Kokborok, the main native languages of the Assamese and Tripuri people respectively. We conservatively estimate based on the 7 languages we have recorded our promotion video in, we are able to reach about 80% of the Indian Population.
Here you can find the links for our projection promotion video in various languages:
Here you can find the links for the translated script for our project promotion video in some other languages:
Why did we include the project promotion video under "Education"? It is important to note that UDL recognizes the inherent differences among individuals and talks about inclusive and individualised educational content. While there is detailed documentation on our wiki about our project, some learners feel more comfortable with audio-visual modes of learning. Furthermore, language is one of the fundamental determining factors shaping the influence of environment on learning, as mentioned by Vygotsky in his socio-cultural learning theory. By making the content available in a diverse set of languages, we have increased accessibility of our video and tried to promote a more inclusive and engaging educational experience.
Educational Package for instructors
While interacting with the children at TTAS, our team started to appreciate the lack of standard educational package for SynBio education. We decided to approach our own biology teachers from school to understand if our thoughts were correct. Interaction with them affirmed our considerations, and also led us to conclude that more people would be encouraged to contribute to SynBio by producing an educational package for teachers which is easy to implement and accessible.
We then decided to come up with suitable educational package for educators from all over the globe. In designing our slides and other educational material, we have tried to emphasize the constructivist approach, which had been successful during our interaction with the young minds in the TTAS session.
We also realise that educational material without adequate availability of worksheets/workbooks is an impediment to the learning process. We have therefore a sample worksheet. We have tried to frame questions thoughtfully to suit the temperament of as many students as possible. In many questions, we have provided alternative modes of communication through diagrams and speeches. The instructors may appropriately modify the worksheet according to the needs of the class. The worksheet has also been designed to unleash the creativity and ingenuity of the students.
Instead of keeping ourselves limited to merely coming up with educational content, we have reached out to educators to judge the extent to which our content can be implemented. We reached out to Ms. Dipanwita Mondal, a teacher in biology in a rural school of West Bengal. She appreciated our educational content and gave us necessary inputs to make it more appealing to youngsters. She felt that the educational package, if implemented properly in the classroom, would make it easier for youngsters to think and appreciate the enormous power of SynBio, be it in controlling climate change to solving health problems.
Primer on biosafety and biosecurity
While talking to the general public on various occasions, we got glimpses of the concerns that the public had about biosafety and biosecurity, and the consequent negative perception about SynBio. As responsible researchers, we felt it was necessary for us to set the record straight and clarify that biosafety was as much a consideration for synthetic biologists as for the general public. We also wished to place on record the regulatory framework in which genetic engineers operate in India, and also the stress that iGEM puts on safety and security. We hope that this small document will clear the confusion about biosafety and biosecurity that exists in the general public and inspire them to contribute meaningfully to the science of SynBio. We have also created a poster on Biosafety, which can be downloaded and used by instructors/researchers/other institutes to emphasize the emphasis on Biosafety, Biosecurity and Bioethics in synthetic biology
References
- Boakye C, Ampiah JG. Challenges and Solutions: The Experiences of Newly Qualified Science Teachers. SAGE Open. April 2017. doi:10.1177/2158244017706710
- https://udlguidelines.cast.org/ (Accessed on 10 October 2021)
- https://www.instructionaldesign.org/models/addie/ (Accessed on 16 September 2021)
- https://elearningindustry.com/top-instructional-design-theories-models-next-elearning-course (Accessed on 14 August 2021)