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Team:DTU-Denmark/Achievements/Policy and Practices
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At the Giant Jamboree, we received a gold medal and an Interlab Study Award. We also won the Overgrad Best Parts Collection.
It's all about communication! A project only becomes valuable if you are able to communicate your methods and discoveries and pass on your experience to your surroundings. Thus, communication is an essential part of every great project.
Introduction | ||
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As we have explained in our outreach strategy, we have chosen to focus on inspiring talented high school students during our project. On the present page you can read about our Policy and Practice initiatives. Due to our initiatives we have already been contacted by several high school students that have participated in our events, because the field of synthetic biology caught their interest. They are now looking for more information on the subject and for supervision on the major Danish high school assignments. Such requests is a great achievement, and we are proud to have excited the students' interest, and we are eager to help them.
From the very beginning of our project we have chosen to focus on communicating the opportunities within synthetic biology to talented high school students. There are many ways and platforms to reach these students - we chose the following initiatives:
Conclusively working with these talented students have been a great and inspirational experience for us. The students unbiased minds allowed them to come up with ideas that we as students with the field of synthetic biology had never thought of. As the project developed we also experienced an increasing interest within synthetic biology and it has been a pleasure to pass this along to new individuals. | ||
Interactive workshop | ||
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In line with our outreach strategy we developed and held a workshop in cooperation with Academy for Talented Youth (ATY). ATY is an initiative for ambitious and talented Danish high school students, primarily interested in science, willing to extend their education beyond the ordinary high school curriculum.
The focus of the workshop was to inspire the students rather than providing dry facts and heavy information. The idea was to make them aware of the huge potential within synthetic biology, including how synthetic biology can provide solutions to several current global problems. We initiated the workshop with an introduction to the iGEM competition, synthetic biology and examples on innovative synthetic biology projects partly inspired by previous iGEM projects. The introductory presentations were followed by an idea development exercise, where the students were to pair a global problem with an element from synthetic biology. Prior to the workshop a list of global problems within different categories such as human health, climate and environment and the future increase in population was created along with a list of elements often applied in synthetic biology such as different proteins, organisms and reporters together with a definition of the individual elements. These lists provided the foundation for the first exercise. During the exercise the students were encouraged to add to the lists and to use their knowledge and imagination in order to pair up the problems with solutions. | ||
Some of the examples the students came up with are listed below:
The workshop was a huge success and many of the students responded positively to the exercise. Due to the positive feedback on the workshop it was held a second time at a camp for talented secondary school students hosted by Science Talents. The concept behind the workshop and the material will be passed on to future iGEM teams, to enable them making it a part of their initial idea development. We emphasised this point to the participants that we would save the ideas and pass them on. This worked as a motivation factor. The talk naturally came across releasing GMO’s in the environment, since many of the ideas that came up included GMO’s used for different purposes that inevitably would be released to the environment. This induced a talk about safety in the lab and the restrictions associated with GMO’s. Take a look at our pages about safety and ethics for more information. Inspirational documentaryIn order to inspire younger students and pass on our knowledge on synthetic and biology we participated in an educating documentary dealing with biomimetic. The documentary dealt with how fascinating nature is and how many great abilities that can be adopted into new applications. The focus was on how the nature build with building blogs all identical no matter what is build, and how we can apply that in building synthetic nature from for example biobricks. We outlined a couple of inspiring examples from previous iGEM projects to illustrate this. i.a. E. Glowli from Cambridge 2010 team, where bioluminescence from fireflies have been adopted into E.coli. The production is organised by the danish production company Alpha film. The documentary are going to be used in high school education. We see it a great benefit to also cover an additional media in the education. The movie is a different way of learning and can hopefully inspire students to …. Other participants in the documentary is a wide range of professors and scientist from DTU. It is currently in the editing phase, but expected to be published in December 2014. ESOF 2014As something very exceptional Copenhagen was the host of Euroscience Open Forum 2014. which is a huge initiative to raise awareness of science in the public. An important element of ESOF 2014 is public outreach programme - Science in the City which takes place in 21-26 June 2014 in Carlsberg City District, Copenhagen. We went there with a stand to talk with high school students about iGEM and synthetic biology. We chose to use the electric circuits metaphor to illustrate the great potential within synthetic biology. The ESOF event was mainly attracting students with an interest within science and thereby a great place to reach our target group. Many students didn’t have any knowledge of synthetic biology but left the stand with excited interest. |     |
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Technical University of Denmark
Department of Systems Biology
Søltofts Plads 221
2800 Kgs. Lyngby
Denmark
+45 45 25 25 25
dtuigem14@gmail.com .
+45 45 25 25 25
dtuigem14@gmail.com . 
