Team:UCSC/EducationalOutreach
Educational Outreach
Why We Need to Do Educational Outreach:
Our Goal for Educational Outreach: encourage more students to engage with, and not be intimidated by, scientific concepts.
We introduced the topic of synthetic biology, which is not familiar within the K-12 demographic. Throughout the presentation we discussed real-world applications of synthetic biology and familiarized students with our process of research in the college setting which can many times look different from high school lab courses. This gave students a better outlook on what it meant to be a part of the STEM field. In the end, our hope was for students to feel more comfortable going forth in pursuing biological research in the future.
Presentation and Strategy for Scott Valley High - 9th graders:
The Scotts Valley High School presentation was set up with Mikayla Heffner’s freshman biology classes. Since this is their first dedicated biology class, this audience had no prior knowledge of molecular biology therefore we started the presentation with the basic fundamentals of biology such as “What is a gene?”. We then built our way up to cover more complex topics including the central dogma of biology and pathogens.
Our Approach with Freshman
Our technique involves breaking down concepts by using analogies. For example, the explanation of the central dogma would be analogous to someone translating the instructions of a Lego set into the structure itself.
To make the presentation interactive, we created a storyline that involves a character falling ill to a stomach bug. We had the audience act as detectives to figure out what made them sick. We used this storyline as a segue into a high level overview of Progenie.
We designed the end of our presentation to connect our research with their current “Scientific Methods” unit in which we highlighted the key differences between what they learn in school versus how real-life research projects occur both in higher education and the industry.
Presentation and Strategy for Kaohsiung American School - 12th graders:
The Kaohsiung American School presentation was set up with Jeff Roth-Vinson’s senior IB 2nd year biology classes. Our audience had a solid background in cell biology, and also had a basic understanding of plasmids and restriction sites. Based on their level of understanding, we were able to go over more scientific topics about our project such as the CRISPR mechanism, transposons, and in-depth project design. We also ended with an inclusive discussion regarding our personal experiences going into STEM as college students as well as emphasizing the importance of trying new things, making mistakes, and being yourself.
Our Approach with Seniors
We broke down our project into different stages and summarized our step-by-step process from gene elimination to infection to conjugation.
We shared our individual experiences and journey to incoming college students to give them advice on how to become involved members of the scientific community.
We dived deep into how Shiga Toxin affects humans on a cellular level using a detailed graphic from a scientific paper.
