Team:WLC-Milwaukee/Communication
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Overview
The WLC-Milwaukee iGEM team firmly believes that science is not valuable to anyone if it is not communicated clearly and effectively. In order to ensure that our project accomplished this, we took the time to interview many experts in the field of education. To read more about those interviews, feel free to visit our Integrated Human Practices page. We also collaborated with other iGEM teams around the globe and had them proofread our lab manual to get a wide range of input from iGEMers. Our Collaborationspage has more information about how other iGEM teams helped us out!
When interviewing educational experts, we engaged a diverse body of instructors. We began our research by interviewing STEM professors at the collegiate level because our project involves conceptually complex topics. Then, we interviewed educational experts outside of the sciences, interviewing a Director of Teacher Education and other teaching professionals. We purposefully interviewed educators in many different settings and trades to ensure that our lab kit was accessible to a wide range of students. In doing this, we learned how to effectively adapt our manual and kit and manipulate them to present these materials in the best way possible.
After constructing our lab manual, we needed feedback on what we could improve. We sent our lab manual to two iGEM teams and asked for criticism. iGEM Duke reminded us to emphasize that the lac operon cannot function if lactose is not in the environment. They also suggested we specify the substrate our kit uses. iGEM MTU-Cork suggested we make some formatting changes to ensure the information flowed well. After multiple groups of science students had looked over our manual, we sought to answer the essential question: can someone who has not been taught gene regulation make sense of our manual? To answer this, we had a communication and marketing student read the manual. Joshua provided welcomed feedback on the formatting and style of the manual and voiced confusion about a few sections. We took all this feedback and made many stylistic improvements in addition to further clarifying the lac operon description and diagram.
One of the most important aspects of scientific communication is consideration of the audience. To gain a deeper understanding of the barriers involved in communicating and teaching science, we held many lab demos. At the lab demos, our team members noticed that not every student learned at the same level. To accommodate this we included three student guides for different levels of education in our manual. Our lab kit also contains a teacher’s guide to assist educators in communicating with their students. To provide an open dialogue between the students and teachers, we included pre-lab, lab, and post-lab sections catered to the corresponding level of education. At the end of the day, it is the educators who will be responsible for the implementation of our project. We included as many materials as possible to simplify that process.
To read our manual, click HERE!
