Team:UMaryland/Education

Community & Education

Community and education are essential to the PhosphoREUSE system developed by our team. The core of the project is based on ease of use for agricultural workers. Our outreach efforts revealed that current bioreactors are implemented underground and are not portable. With this in mind, we strove to create a system that could be used by anyone. Our design was built around being portable and efficient. We created mesh filters that could be replaced once used.

Education Efforts

To translate these same principles to educational outreach, our team reached out to younger audiences. We taught them the concepts of engineering and synthetic biology and how they can be used to solve real-world problems. Moreover, we reached out to an elementary school and presented our project along with concepts of STEM to second graders. Our audience had a limited understanding of what phosphorus pollution is, so we created a storybook to interact with and explain these concepts better. We teamed up with Calgary to create multiple storybooks that explain our projects in a simplified manner. To reach a broader audience, we translated the storybook into German, French, and Italian. We hope that these small lessons and activities can inspire younger audiences to explore and think about how technology can be used to fix everyday problems.

Education Materials

Here are some of the educational materials we used to help inspire young kids to be involved in STEM! We hope these materials can also offer inspiration to other teams developing their own materials!