Introduction to the 4273pi project video transcript
Hi there.
My name is Richard Fitzpatrick. I am a Postdoc in bioinformatics education at the University of Edinburgh. I'm delighted to present my poster introducing Scottish school students to bioinformatics through the 4273 Pi project. I don't have time in this video to cover everything, so if you want to find out more, please do catch me during the conference virtually or contact me on the details that you can see below. Thank you.
The project is not just me. I'm the workshop leader currently for the 4273 Pi project, but the team is much broader than that. Daniel Barker was the one that helped originate this way back in about 2016 as a public engagement project in Scotland. You can see we still have members in St. Andrews where they started. We are mainly in Edinburgh, but we also have people in Glasgow. If people want to take part and want to find out more about taking part in this project, please do get in touch with me. We'd be delighted to have you.
Our aims are broadly to reach all Scottish secondary schools and deliver workshops or teacher training to help these schools understand bioinformatics a little bit more than they currently perhaps do. There's currently bioinformatics on the Scottish school curriculum for Higher Biology and Human Biology, which is aimed at about 16 to 18-year-olds. But we find that teachers often either don't have the background in bioinformatics or the confidence in explaining bioinformatics to school students in a way which makes sense.
What we do is we either deliver in-person student workshops around bioinformatics at two different levels, which I'll talk about in a minute, or we deliver teacher training to help teachers to deliver the materials that we've already made for those workshops, and to help them embed parts of that into their own teaching practice. We provide them with the lesson plans, our teaching materials, our worksheets, and they can use that to fit into their own teaching wherever they may be.
In Scotland, we've reached 50% of Scottish secondary schools with this approach so far. We hope to reach 75% over the coming few years. We're really looking forward to seeing how far we can take this project.
Talking about reach, you can see that we've reached all the way up to the Shetland Isles, all the way down to the borders of England. This reach is quite wide-reaching as it is the central belt there, which you can see in the box shows you, this is the most densely populated area of Scotland. You can see that we've got a good reach there, but we still have a lot to do.
The reason why we perhaps haven't always visited places in those areas is there's something called the Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation, which factors into our delivering of workshops. We put calls out online on a mailing list called SYNAPSE, and it's usually quite popular. People are really interested in taking our workshops on. For especially these workshops, we have a lot of repeat interest as well.
We're trying to focus on schools which are low on this Scottish index of multiple deprivation (SIMD), which is quite complicated. But it helps us measure areas where the level of opportunities for various things are perhaps lower than elsewhere. It tends to be targeting areas and reaching pupils which perhaps don't always get the level of university interaction, for example, as others in the higher levels would.
We have three workshops, two which we currently do quite a lot of, and one which we're just finishing developing and we're hoping to take into schools in the coming autumn.
Food Detective is aimed at younger students. This is aimed at the national five level, which is about 15 years old. At this level, they know what DNA is and they know something about the central dogma, but not massive amounts about DNA, and especially nothing really about bioinformatics. We generally introduce this, we have this narrative where we have a handmade pork sausage which we sequenced. It was real many, many years ago and there's a series of DNA barcodes that we ask them to run BLAST searches on and see where they've come from, and then come up with hypotheses about how these particular barcodes for these particular animals came to be found in this pork sausage. And we have a lot of fun with that. It uses freely available resources and we can do it on any device. This makes it quite portable and quite easy for teachers to also embed this in their own practice if they wish.
The second workshop is more tightly linked to the curriculum, and so is perhaps the one most in demand. This is aimed at the highers level, this is 16-18 year-olds. As I've said, it focuses on something called the Gulo gene, which is involved in vitamin C synthesis. We provide a case study where we ask them to go and find out this unknown protein. Do a BLAST search, find out what it is, find out what organism it comes from, and then see whether humans have something similar. We do a DNA sequence alignment using the BLAST website, and they find that there is a pseudogene as a result of a series of substitution, insertion and deletion mutations. We can talk to them about that knowledge, which they already have as part of their degree. We talk about frameshifts. The human gene has a series of frameshift mutations. We can talk to them about what the implications of those have been for the actual protein that possibly is made.
And then the evolutionary chatter that we can have about that. Why is it that humans didn't die out if we still need vitamin C? We talk about things like diet and other organisms as well if we have time. And then what we do is we replicate that using the Raspberry Pi computer. These are little mini portable computers we take into the schools. It exposes the students to a Linux environment and a command-line environment. We can talk to them about how bioinformaticians tend to use that because of how we are using data and processing data and the size of our datasets. We tend to have volunteers come along who are bioinformaticians at various different levels. All the way from master students and PhD students all the way up to heads of bioinformatics departments. The students get the chance to talk to a lot of people with very different backgrounds as well coming into bioinformatics, which people find quite interesting.
We have a brand new workshop that we're hoping to deliver as well, which is based on PCR, which is something which is also on the curriculum. We're focusing on primer design, which is the most bioinformatics element to it, but I'm trying to introduce a lot of student choice in this. There's going to be six different case studies which are Scottish-specific case studies around various animals. Students are going to be able to pick how the workshop is going to go. They'll be able to choose the case study they want to look at, which will all have different slight problem-solving activities. And then we'll come together as a group and focus on one in more detail. Each workshop is going to be different, a lot of student choice.
And we're doing that because we're finding that we need to change and evolve with students as time goes on. This is something which is becoming quite important as different skills are being developed in students that we are not necessarily capitalizing on.
I'm very much interested in game-based learning and using games in teaching. We've got in development some areas to help visualize some of that sequence alignment data I talked about in the second workshop using Minecraft.
Not got any more time than that. Thank you very much for listening. If you want to catch me at the conference, please do, and thank you for coming along to the poster.