Team:Wellesley Desyne/Outreach

Outreach

Overview

At the Wellesley HCI Lab, we are committed to fostering education, and strongly believe in the power of mentorship. The 2013 Wellesley iGEM team worked toward achieving this goal by promoting Synthetic Biology public education and awareness with our outreach project Bac to the Future. By demonstrating this project in various public settings, including with groups of middle school and high school students, we focused on making Synthetic Biology concepts fun and accessible to students and non-scientists. Additionally, we participated in the Wellesley College Science Outreach program and mentored high school interns in the human-computer interaction lab throughout the summer.

MIT-Wellesley Upward Bound

We performed three user studies for Bac to the Future with the MIT-Wellesley Upward Bound program, student ages ranging from 12-17. To prepare for these studies and explore the potential use of our application in an educational setting, we prepared a brief preliminary presentation to introduce Synthetic Biology concepts and terminology, and also performed a project demonstration. The students then worked through the application in groups of 2 or more.

Interns

Throughout the summer, we had four high schools interns join the HCI Lab: Neoreet Braha, Artemis Metaxa, Raquel Penha, and Yoav Segev. Each intern was paired with lab mentors, and assisted with project development and execution. In the process, they learned about Human-Computer Interaction, user-centered design, Synthetic Biology, and programming skills.

Summer Poster Session

As a lab, we participated in the annual Wellesley Science Center Summer Research Poster Session, which is attended by students, faculty, and members of the local community. Each project team prepared and displayed a poster outlining the project abstract, design process, results, and future work. We also performed on-site demonstrations.