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6.2 years ago
abhay.krishna
▴
50
I have been asked to give a demonstration of how bioinformatics is revolutionising life sciences on a STEM day in school with primary and secondary students. I would like to have an opinion from more experienced educators and wise bioinformatics wizard for advice, resource, case study that they can share which can excite kids to be interested and passionate about bioinformatics.
We always used 3D protein models in public events... Not very creative, I know, but at least they're pretty. And let's face it, while the masses of data that we crunch and code that we write are super-attractive to us, they are kinda boring for a layperson. Another thing I have done for an open door day, was offering visitors to play FoldIT and EterNA.
That said, I have seen the following activity being quite successful.
You could demonstrate the genome sequencing/assembly problem with a pile of papers containing a text (poem or something, make sure to include "repeats") and then shred those papers (yielding reads) and then puzzle them back together. Or prepare reads (including errors) and align them back to the reference poem. Then explain that is exactly what we're doing in genomics and the problems that you have shown are part of our daily (and nightly) worklife.
I don't know how old your visitors are but I found the following really cool: https://monster-lab.org/
That's cool (huge fan of Mega Cow https://monster-lab.org/monster/35b8cf33-51fc-41fa-8579-f1f3665ce330/ ). Ask kids to create a monster type and then "do some genetics" on that...
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