Bear with me on this intro, I promise I’m going somewhere. If you knew me personally you would know that my sense of humour is largely based on referencing early 2000s t.v. shows and hoping so earnestly that whoever I’m talking to knows at all what I’m talking about. There’s this one episode of Ned’s Declassified School Survival Guide where one of the main characters “Cookie” takes a new math class and sort of “edits” the problems his teacher gives him in order to make the problems more interesting and fun. For example, when his teacher asks him to read a problem aloud in class which says something along the lines of “If one train travels north at this speed and another travels southwest at this speed, how far away will the trains be after 1 hour?” Cookie changes the first train into a ware-wolf and the second train into a sea monster.

My point here (I promise there is one), is that I’ve seen through volunteering with Let’s Talk Science the importance of fun in learning science. As I mentioned in previous posts, I became an employee with Let’s Talk Science in Ottawa before starting my CSL placement, and when I went into this placement I honestly questioned how doing LTS outreach could possibly get me course credit in genetics because it really seemed to me like I would be getting credit just for making fun science themed crafts. But to my surprise, despite every LTS activity being focused on providing the kids with a fun science themed experience, each activity is also subtly packed with plenty of learning goals. This post is gonna focus on the genetics related concepts I’ve observed in LTS outreach activities I’ve done in kids, but also how doing these activities has enriched my experience with the course content of my genetics course.

I’ve been able to deliver three different genetics related LTS activities with kids, that being “DNA Bracelets,” “DNA Candy,” and “The Amazing Race.” DNA bracelets is an activity I’ve delivered many times where kids get to make a bracelet based on an example gene. Each of the four nitrogenous bases are represented by a different colour of bead. The problem though as you can see in the photo above is that the kids have to make a bracelet which represents a double stranded molecule of DNA even though we only provide a single sequence of bases. Therefore I have to explain to the kids during this activity the concept of complementary base pairing during DNA replication. Sometimes if I have more than four colours of beads and enough time, I give the kids the option of making a bracelet with one strand of DNA and the complimentary strand of mRNA where a fifth colour of bead represents uracil (C). In this case I’ll have to discuss basic transcription and compare DNA versus RNA which is pretty heavy science for most high schoolers. I know from my own studies as well as my time doing LTS activities that whenever I need to explain a rather complicated scientific concept I need to find some sort of fun and memorable way to present the information so that it sticks, especially as when the kids are younger. I had always struggled to find some way to make complementary base pairing rules memorable to kids until one time I did this activity with a community group and one of the older kids said just as a joke to his friends “I wish I could be adenine so that I could be paired with U.” I found this cheesy joke so funny that if I’m ever delivering this activity I always remember to say this joke, and I’ve never been able to forget the base pairs since then.

The DNA candy activity is a simple activity catered to younger elementary school kids where the kids get to make a model of a DNA double helix out of Twizzlers, toothpicks, and differently coloured marshmallows. As you can see in the picture below, the Twizzlers represent the sugar phosphate backbone, while the marshmallows represent the paired bases connected together by the toothpick. Along with addressing the concept of complimentary base pairing, this activity also addresses the 3D molecular structure of the DNA double helix, especially because the Twizzlers can be twisted over each other and the whole model can actually look like an accurate double helix with the bases facing inwards. As a visual learner myself, I had never liked looking at diagrams of DNA structures so being able to make one of these candy models myself and being able to hold and manipulate it in my hands has helped me establish a better and more tangible idea of the structure of DNA. For myself as well as the young kids which had probably hadn’t even started learning about cells in school yet, building these candy DNA models made learning the structures within DNA more memorable through fun.

The last activity I’ll talk about is “The Amazing Race” which is an activity I’ve done once which is only done for 11th or 12th graders. It’s a parody of the competition t.v. show of the same name where students are grouped into teams and have to complete different tasks and receive different clues, and the “pit stop” is proposing a drug treatment plan to a fake patient. I find that this activity requires me to apply knowledge that I’ve learned throughout my degree so far and within my genetics course especially when it comes to interpreting and making conclusions based on experimental data. Below is a picture of the overall task which the students are presented with.

All along the way as the activity progresses, I have to act as the judge and dictate whether or not the teams have correctly finished a task and move them to their next clues. This means that I have to actually understand what the students are looking for. Now honesty time, the first and only time so far that I have delivered this activity I would say I wasn’t very prepared. This was the first outreach activity I did as part of my CSL placement so I knew generally what I would be doing and I reviewed the answer key which I would be using to evaluate if teams had completed their tasks, but when it came to the tasks themselves I saw them for the first time when I was with the students (oops!). This means that in order for the activity to go along smoothly and fairly with the class I had to apply my knowledge well. Take for example the first task which requires teams to identify a point mutation and sequence inversion in a sequence from their patient versus a reference sequence. I recall that my answer key only said “point mutation at this nucleotide and inversion from this nucleotide to this nucleotide.” Therefore this first task had me working with the kids to make sure I knew what a point mutation and sequence inversion even was, so I was being tested on my knowledge of the base pairing rules since I had to verify that the students had identified the point mutation by observing which bases were paired incorrectly.

Another task within this activity entails giving the students info cards that describe the effect of different mutations along with test results where the students have to evaluate if certain mutations are present in their patient. For example, what I’ve shown above is the infographic showing what our “Gene 1” does and the data showing the effect of a nucleotide insertion mutation on “Gene 1”. It has to be inferred from the infographic that the gene is responsible for coding for a protein which inhibits a biochemical pathway in cells stimulating cell division, and therefore a mutation in this gene likely causes this function to be lost. This hypothesis has to be confirmed using the data shown on the right which describes that a mutation on this gene does in fact lead to a higher than normal amount of cells. Even writing this down right now and trying to recall these info cards when I was delivering the activity with the students is forcing me to do a bit of mental gymnastics to fully comprehend this hypothesis. When I was actually delivering the activity though right at the beginning of my time in the genetics course, I really had to take the time to think through this process and interpret what the infographic was telling me regarding the function of the gene and what the data was telling me about the effect of the mutation. I remember the stress I had at the time when I had competing high school students trying to complete these tasks as fast as possible to win and I felt like I had to evaluate their answers as quickly as possible but also be certain that I was actualy right in order to keep the competition fair. Additionally, the example I showed above is only one of the gene cards that we give the students out of twelve! I think that it’s safe to say that this activity was a good test of my ability to make accurate but timely conclusions about the functions of different genes as well as the effects of mutations given only experimental results. This concept relates very well to one of the primary objectives of module 3 within the course which was to understand “experimental methods commonly used to analyze gene structure, gene expression, gene function, and genetic variants.” Finally, perhaps the best thing about my experience delivering this activity was that the fun and competitive atmosphere we created trying to replicate the actual Amazing Race show through the activity helped the scientific concepts we addressed stick in my memory up until now.

I’ve been doing LTS outreach activities for almost a year now and getting increasingly more involved in the program over time. Originally I didn’t see very much educational value to the kids I was presenting to and especially myself, because I was mostly focused on the fun of the activities and therefore primarily saw LTS as much more recreational than extracurricular. But through doing different activities which sometimes relate well to my course content, I was able to see that quite a lot of tangible skills and scientific knowledge can be developed in both the students as well as myself in just one hour of an outreach activity that’s always grounded in one thing: fun.

It’s been about 2 months now since the start of the semester and my CSL placement with Let’s Talk Science (LTS), and believe me when I say that during this time I’ve been able to learn a lot. Perhaps one of the most interesting parts of this placement is the external life lessons I’ve learned in the most unexpected of settings. This post is the story of how putting a teaspoon of baking powder in a container of water in front of a room of 5th graders impacted my professional perspectives. More specifically, I’ve been able to see parallels between my volunteering in science outreach and career paths I may take.

“The story of how putting a teaspoon of baking powder in a container of water in front of a room of 5th graders impacted my professional perspectives”

– Matthew Robrigado (2020) Because I find stock photos incredibly funny

Let’s establish the setting of this story; since my first post from the start of my CSL placement I’ve done TONS of activity prep work, done much more outreach, and also visited the Bruyere clinic where I saw a doctor, phlebotomist, and pharmacist.

Let’s start with my recent visit to Centre de Médecine Familiale Bruyère. Firstly, my future career aspiration is to go to medical school in Canada and become a licensed physician. Through high school I had always looked up to health professionals and painted a mental picture of them as incredibly competent, intelligent, and innovators within the scientific community. I also held onto the misconception that if I ever become a doctor I would have learned somewhere along the way how to manage my responsibilities easily and live life at a much more relaxed pace than what I’m experiencing as a student. Now for my visit to the clinic, I had to meet with several health professionals which were all people that I could see myself as in the future. As I was making my rounds in the centre and talked to different people one thing that I caught onto was that nearly everyone I had to talk to had to explain something to me. Like when my doctor was writing my prescription they had to inform me of what we needed to keep an eye on through blood tests, and then when I picked up the prescription my pharmacist had to describe to me all the possible side effects I could expect from my medication. Not to brag, but since I’ve started university and taken classes on anatomy, physiology, and biopharmaceuticals I started to become able to piece together what health professionals are really saying to me. What I realized though was that all this time, health professionals have had to become extremely well versed in speaking about complex scientific phenomena in a simple and easy to comprehend manner. Sure doctors can still be like my high school image and be competent, intelligent, and innovative; but when it comes to actually doing their job and interacting with patients I came to realize that a very large portion of the job everyday is conveying their breadth of knowledge to regular people who really don’t know any better. In a sense health professionals and likely so many others within the scientific community have to have some ability in teaching, because being knowledgeable isn’t enough when your profession requires you to be able to convey your knowledge.

So what does this long story of my visit to the doctor have to do with my placement and a teaspoon of baking powder? Well, when I started to notice that health professionals and scientists in general had to learn how to communicate what they know on top of just knowing it, I thought about how that applies to my experience doing science outreach in LTS. I mostly do outreach with elementary school kids and essentially teach things that I’ve been learning and building upon in school for many years. Despite the fact that I may have learned the science I’m explaining to the kids a long time ago, sometimes I find that I have trouble explaining what I’m supposed to. For instance, when I’m delivering one of my favourite activities called “Chemical vs. Physical” there is a part of the activity where I have the kids put a teaspoon of baking soda into a cup of water and they see that the reaction between the two makes gas bubbles. Next I put another teaspoon of baking powder into a small film canister of water, close the lid, and shake up the canister. Eventually the gas that’s produced pops the lid off dramatically, often the lid hits the ceiling and there’s some water that splashes; the kids absolutely love this activity. But, before I put any baking soda in the water I try to get the kids to tell me what they think is going to happen. In my head it’s so obvious to me that since they already saw that the reaction makes gas, if I put a lid on the reaction there will be a build up of pressure which pops the lid off. Of course now I’ve seen that in reality kids need a little bit more help with this explanation and sometimes I need to explain what it means for gas to create pressure or how a confined space contributes to this. In a sense, you could see kids as patients which ask their doctor everything. If a patient wanted to ask their doctor the meaning behind every treatment they recommend, it’s the doctor’s job to be able to explain to their patient why they’ve chosen a certain treatment in a manner that they will understand. This degree of communication skills is not something that I anticipated would be such an integral part of being a physician, and I’ve been able to see through my science outreach that this is something just as important to my education in science as increasing my breadth of knowledge.

Now I just want to dive a little deeper into my “TONS” of prep work. As I mentioned in my first post, before my placement I was already the rural coordinator for LTS at uOttawa and now with this placement I do LTS outreach volunteering on top of my work. Since my last post we had the February reading week, and that week may have been the hardest I’ve ever worked for LTS since starting my position. There were rural full day trips nearly every day of the reading week which I had to coordinate from the ground up and prepare all the activities for, not to mention that I was also volunteering on one of them. I can’t do justice to the amount of effort that I put into everything related to LTS over the past month in text. My point is that I already knew working for and volunteering with LTS would help me develop professional skills like organization, time management, and effective communication, but what I didn’t anticipate was that I would also gain so much grit and resilience. “Putting a teaspoon of baking powder in a container of water” doesn’t sound like a science outreach activity that could become overwhelming, but when you have to prepare this along with about 25 other activities for a total of about 350 to 400 kids in the midst of Ontario Teacher Strikes, not to mention finding volunteers and training all of them over just a few days… things can easily get overwhelming. Needless to say, I was working extremely hard. What I learned though from this past month of tireless and exhausting work and volunteering with LTS is probably a lesson I’ll keep throughout my educational and professional career.

When times get tough and stress piles into a mountain I saw firsthand that the solution is not always just to “white-knuckle down” and become a workhorse with no more human needs of food and rest. When I first just tried to do this I found myself at a pretty extreme low of feeling overwhelmed and exhausted to the point of hopelessness. In the past I would solely rely on my ability to work hard for a long time to fulfill my responsibilities, but only recently have I seen that as life gets increasingly harder and as I get increasingly more busy, the possibility of burnout is also increasingly more real. I knew that this would absolutely not be sustainable to get through reading week, much less my whole placement and certainly not a work environment as demanding as that of a physician if that is truly my career aspiration. I saw that in order to sustain myself I had to learn tangible strategies to deal with stress such as prioritizing time for self-care even in a packed schedule, and turning to trusted friends and even professionals to talk to and diffuse my internal feelings and isolation of working so hard. I saw that I’ve always been a good student and even a good employee until now because I’ve built good practical skills in the past like responsibility, dedication to my work ethic, and multitasking, but the only way I’ll be able to tackle the onslaught of challenges within professional adult world is to develop effective stress management and self-care skills. After this past month which was quite possibly one of the hardest times of my life, I saw that in order for me to be a competent employee able to survive life after university I need to continue developing the skills it takes to simply take care of myself.

So overall, it’s very safe to say that this past month of my CSL placement has taught me a lot. Along with further developing my skills and competencies in time management, public speaking, and teamwork, I’ve begun to really start learning how to prioritize my well-being at the same time as all my school and work obligations. My goal is to see myself continue to build on what I’ve learned through this placement and carry it with me through my development as a professional after graduating.