Team:Queens Canada/Communication
Education
ScienceQuest
In response to the feedback from our community survey, specifically the strong opinion that awareness and public education are some of the most crucial factors in stopping the spread of Lyme disease, we wanted to take action. Our team partnered up with another Queens-based organization, ScienceQuest, which hosts science summer camps for elementary and junior high school kids. As a result, we were able to teach kids about the danger of Lyme disease and ticks as well as play a few science-based Kahoots, host an at-home experiment, and introduce them to the world of synthetic biology. We were hopeful of inspiring the next generation of iGEMers!
Edge of Lyme
Edge of Lyme is a hack-a-thon style competition backed by the Wicked Ideas grant. Various researchers and educators supporting and helping with this year’s iGEM project were collaborating to further research Lyme disease. They invited us to help organize this upcoming event in conjunction with the Bioinformatics club at Queen's University in which students from all disciplines form teams and collaborate to solve various problems in the world of Lyme disease. All participants in this weeklong competition will all receive financial compensation in addition to prizes that can be won at this competition. This event is set to take place in February 2022.
This event is targeted towards community awareness as a response to our survey data on the importance of community education and awareness. By organizing and hosting an event that spans all disciplines, we are able to raise awareness about Lyme disease and its tick counterparts in the university community here at Queens.
Queens APSC 100
In our human practices work, we not only want to focus on community engagement and awareness surrounding our project but also to promote and educate on the world of synthetic biology. Additionally, in the past, we have noticed that although most engineers have fantastic potential to work in the field of synthetic biology, many do not get any exposure to it throughout their education. Our team has been working with the course coordinators for the first-year engineering program here at Queen's University and has developed a synthetic biology option design project. First-year engineers have the option (among other projects) to choose to build a portable fluorimeter device capable of detecting an array of fluorescent proteins and light-absorbing molecules. We chose this as a project to propose to the course coordinators as it involves many different disciplines such as biochemistry, chemistry, electrical engineering, software engineering, mechanical engineering, etc. Additionally, this project touches on a reoccurring theme among previous Queens_Canada projects, as over the past few years, many of the projects have had a portable fluorimeter component. Therefore, new designs could be very useful for future teams as well as there are previous iterations students can use as a reference. We hope that having the option to partake in a synthetic biology project as part of their coursework will spark more students to get involved in the world of synthetic biology!
Newsletters
To keep our advisors, team members, and collaborating teams up to date on our project, we released a weekly newsletter with updates about new progress on the project and any changes. We divided the newsletter into subsections: wet lab, dry lab, and outreach as well as included a timeline/calendar section to keep members updated on our team goals.