Spreading awareness with the community
We hosted three one-hour lessons at Adobe Bluffs Elementary School to teach 80+ elementary students (fourth and fifth graders) about waste pollution and the three R’s of waste management (reduce, reuse, recycle). In our lessons, we taught with a Google Slides presentation, a card-sorting game, a Blooket game, and many interesting discussions on the topic. Additionally, we used the iGEM stickers from our 2025 iGEM Distribution Kit as prizes for the Blooket, where we rewarded the students with the best accuracy in their answers as well as the students with the highest scores in the game. In one of our lessons, we also spent 10-15 minutes after the lesson to carry out a school cleanup, where our iGEM Outreach volunteer and the elementary students picked up trash in the school yard. This hands-on opportunity to make an impact in their own school was a great experience for the elementary students and it was also a great way for us to spread our passion for environmental protection!
We published a Community Outreach Survey which introduces our research, specifically about how and why we are aiming to improve the feasibility of PHB plastics in order to help reduce plastic pollution. Through this survey, we gained lots of insights on the public’s understanding of the three R’s of waste management, plastic pollution, and the types and other topics regarding plastics. Thanks to the effort from our team, especially our Outreach team, we were able to spread words about our survey and get 376 responses. Shown below is the content of our survey and (below it is) a thorough analysis of the survey responses that we received.
Westview Nexus is a student group at our high school that writes and publishes our school newspaper, officially called The Nexus. Westview Nexus writes about many interesting things happening at our school such as any personal stories that teachers and students want to share, any significant school events, any achievements that could be highlighted, and more. This 2025 - 2026 school year, Westview iGEM will be featured in a Nexus article that is scheduled to be published on The Nexus’s website (https://wvnexus.org/) on Friday, October 10th, 2025. This article will go over the journey of our project, the cause that we are working on, any successes and setbacks we had along the way. This article was made possible thanks to the effort of The Nexus, especially the staff writer who wrote the article, and our Westview iGEM student leaders who spent their time elaborating information about our project to be written in the article!
Through this article, we can educate others on the alarming issue of plastic pollution, how we aim to help solve it by promoting PHB, and the synthetic biology and bioinformatics behind our project. This article will be a chance for us to teach about our cause, further the reach of our mission, and gain more support from our community, especially the young, passionate, and curious minds at our school!
Our informative Instagram posts are a big part of our social media activities. Throughout the season our Outreach members have designed and published on our Instagram many informative posts. Our posts are to teach a variety of topics that are relevant to our project: plastic pollution, the three R’s, synthetic biology, the laboratory techniques that we perform, etc. We published 23 well-designed informative Instagram posts that many people enjoy checking out and have complimented. By developing our Instagram page, we expanded our reach, raised awareness about our mission and cause, and taught others using our knowledge and experience with synthetic biology.
We really took the chance to showcase our project in our Project Promotion Video. In the video, we introduced the drastic issue of plastic pollution and the reason behind why we are trying to make PHB a more viable plastic alternative. Additionally, we went over the synthetic biology and genetic engineering involved in our project, where we introduced our two genes (dehydrogenase and depolymerase) and what we are aiming to do with them. We also went into the specifics about how we plan to implement our project into transforming the community. Our Outreach team recognized that it is really important to not only teach others about our project, but to also explain how our project is going to impact everyone’s life.
After our Project Promotion Video was completed, we implemented it into our outreach, as we would show it as an introduction and overview of our project to those who are curious about our research. Additionally, we have included the video on our Community Outreach Survey so those who fill the survey can check the video out and learn about our project.