Education
Teaching philosophy statement
Goals
The primary goals of our teaching philosophy are inclusivity and diversity. To achieve that, we are engaging with the broader community to educate it, thus making life-sciences more accessible and applicable.
We are also promoting an inclusive and diverse environment, whereby we try to include diverse groups into scientific work, both from the aspect of teachers and the participants.
Finally, we are teaching students to master new skills by implementing interactive learning, showing them how to improve problem-solving skills and develop critical reasoning. As the overall goal, we seek to inspire people to study and learn life sciences, as we provide active learning tools and possibilities.
Methods to reach goals
Our methods to achieve the above goals include:
- fostering engagement, implemented through information sessions and lectures
- developing online learning tools to broaden the reach
- getting involved in interactive workshops, intended to foster active learning and social inclusion
- organizing summer school, thus opening up doors for participants' entry into the field of bioengineering
Success metrics
We estimate that our approach is successful due to the high number of students who reference our workshops as the inspiration to enter the life-science program in the university. We also try to identify further space for improvement from feedback we get during events and feedback forms.
Inclusive environment
Our activities are implemented both in Estonia and abroad and our target audience is quite broad, including people of different ages, languages and levels of education.
Overview
We reached a broad range of communities in this iGEM season: from local communities in Narva and Tartu, from kindergarten kids to senior citizens, from biology enthusiasts to participants in the international robotics competition from around the world. Moreover, we designed, organized and hosted an international Summer School. Participants from 9 countries came to Estonia for two weeks to study the principles of and applications of logic gates in synthetic biology.
During our events, we always engaged in dialogue with participants, answered their questions, and tried to address concerns and potential ethical issues connected with synthetic biology.
Experiments that we conduct during public engagement activities demonstrate how biosciences can be fascinating and exciting, and could potentially raise interest in the participants. We also provide participants with instructions on how to reproduce the results of workshops at home, disseminating the knowledge beyond workshop participants.
We want our wiki page to be a valuable resource to all specialists, teachers, educators, and future iGEM teams. We encourage others to use our protocols as a starting point, translate them into local languages and disseminate them among broad and diverse communities. To achieve that, we provide protocols, video tutorials, and guidelines for all our outreach activities. We motivate future teams to build upon our educational materials and engage even broader communities in synthetic biology and bioengineering.
Summer school
Synthetic Biology and its Applications / Summer School 2025
Photos made by: Undercliff Creative
The summer school we organized focused on developing some experience with synthetic biology, as well as discussions about progress and development of various applications. Thus, the senior high school pupils and young bachelor students had hands-on experience in molecular cloning and genetic engineering. In particular, their work involved genetically modifying baker's yeast (S. cerevisiae) with plasmid vectors, thus educating them about regulation of gene expression. They also got familiarized with logic gates to understand how promoters are regulated and used different fluorophores as reporters. With regard to the experimental work, they also performed Western Blotting, Flow cytometry, and microscopy. Thereby, they got to learn how it is to work in a lab and operate some of the equipment. Finally, they not only got to perform the experiments, but were also taught how to plan them (including performing in silico work beforehand), collect data and interpret it.
The summer school participants also got to attend the lectures on general applications of synthetic biology in today's world, how to use logic gates in synthetic biology work and on the basics of homologous recombination and its application in synthetic biology.
As one of the key underlying policies we try to foster to achieve the above goals, it is also important to cultivate understanding of the subject. Thus, we are keen that our participants in summer school fully grasp and understand the context and thus be able to implement a similar approach to solving other problems in the future. To do so, we implement individual approaches, trying to make it suitable for the given student participants.
Widely accessible
When it comes to summer school, we try to create a very comfortable environment, promote positive emotions and foster inspirational work among the participants. In addition to the participants in the summer school, we also try to engage with the public more broadly, by creating experimental setups which could be recreated at home. With regard to such protocols, all the necessary components and reagents are easily accessible by the general public. We also create protocols in multiple languages, to broaden the community we communicate with.
In addition, even though our workshops are meant for any age group, they are adjusted according to the participants. Our team members also come from many different countries, and they always try to create a good atmosphere, so everyone feels comfortable and wholeheartedly participates with the project. We believe that such efforts make a substantial difference in participants' engagement and, ultimately, quality of learning.
Goals we believe in
The key tenets that are the foundation of the Estonia-TUBI iGEM team are inclusivity and diversity. At present, there is an ever-increasing need for educated and informed expertise both in fostering scientific development and formulating public policy that would promote it. Bearing that in mind, we believe that making science education widely accessible and available to a broad and widespread audience is crucial to resolving future obstacles and fostering social development. Thus, in addition to seeing education as a means of passing on the crucial information and teaching necessary skills for how to utilize and implement the knowledge, we also believe that education is also a means for generating a sense of belonging and opportunity within the broader community.
To foster these central keystones of education, as we see it, we also believe that the primary way this could be done is by engaging students with evidence-based science. With development of science being one of the cornerstones of humanity's progress in the last few hundred years, we have become increasingly reliant on scientific advancement for improvement of life conditions for an increasing number of people. Focus on education in evidence-based science is one of the principled ways this has been achieved since it educates people on how to think about different ways to solve practical problems. Yet, fostering such education is not only better because it increases public's understanding of how nature operates and the way it could be utilized for humanity's needs but is beneficial for reasoning in many other areas of human work. We believe that such approach is applicable beyond matters of scientific problems as it fosters better evaluation of the problems of different kinds and more analytic decision-making in general.
Our approach to achieving these goals
Estonia-TUBI iGEM team consists of bioengineering-oriented members from different backgrounds. Our team strives to educate both individuals and the public in general on how scientific knowledge could be utilized for developing means for more sustainable development. Although education that we promote is widely accessible, we also pay close attention to every individual that was part of our educational setups. By doing so, we aim for the students to develop transferable skills which they could utilize in their future education and careers. Thus, we implement interactive learning and active workshops during our summer schools. In particular, we aim to stimulate students to make them more independent in thinking and developing their own ideas, which opens up possibilities for more creative ways to solve practical problems.
In short, the important tenets of our educational approach are student engagement, fostering their motivation, individual approaches, providing support and constructive feedback to all students and, last but not least, maintaining a good atmosphere.
Implementation
We aim to achieve the above goals by implementing different approaches to engage the participants with the topic of their study. In our view, this goal is best achieved by utilizing most of their senses: not only to look, but also smell, touch and listen. For example, by manually handling the experimental material one learns better as one is more engaged with the material one is learning about. These approaches are also in accordance with our above-stressed emphasis on evidence-based science. Thus, the participants are encouraged to seek new avenues to apply their newly acquired knowledge and skills.
Furthermore, we also foster interactions with and among students, thus making the entire learning environment more interactive and participatory. As we have come to realize over the years, the participants themselves start to appreciate the knowledge they have acquired. As a result, we see these approaches as important steps in creating a more inclusive and supportive community of prospective scientists.