Team:The Tech Museum

Welcome!

The Tech Museum of Innovation is a science and technology center in San Jose, California. Our overarching mission is to inspire the innovator in everyone. This year, we are trying to do just that within synthetic biology space through our participation in iGEM!

This is the first time a museum has entered the iGEM competition We are excited to prototype new ways in which, we as an institution, can offer novel activities to excite and educate our community. Therefore, the goal of our project is to create an exhibit that engages the public in a hands-on synthetic biology experience.

We want to allow people of all ages and with no biology background to become part of our iGEM team. Museum visitors contribute to our project at two stages. They transform bacteria with a plasmid pool designed to randomly generate a wide range of colors in the resulting colonies. And, they participate in data collection and analysis of the rainbow colored bacteria to help us discover the diversity of hues that are actually generated.

We hope to use our project as a vehicle for getting people interested in and excited about the power of synthetic biology. Colored bacteria are just plain cool!

There are a few wiki requirements teams must follow:

• All pages, images and files must be hosted on the 2014.igem.org server.
• All pages must be created under the team’s name space.
• As part of your documentation, keep the links from the menu to the left.
• Do not use flash in wiki code.
• The iGEM logo should be placed on the upper part of every page and should link to 2014.igem.org.

Visit the Wiki How To page for a complete list of requirements, tips and other useful information.

Tips

We are currently working on providing teams with some easy to use design templates.
In the meantime you can also view other team wikis for inspiration! Here are some very good examples

• 2013 SDU Denmark
• 2013 SYSU China
• 2013 Shenxhen BGIG ATCG
• 2013 Colombia Unianades
• 2013 Lethbridge

For a full wiki list, you can visit iGEM 2013 web sites and iGEM 2012 web sites lists.

This wiki will be your team’s first interaction with the rest of the world, so here are a few tips to help you get started:

• State your accomplishments! Tell people what you have achieved from the start.
• Be clear about what you are doing and what you plan to do.
• You have a global audience! Consider the different backgrounds that your users come from.
• Make sure information is easy to find; nothing should be more than 3 clicks away.
• Avoid using very small fonts and low contrast colors; information should be easy to read.
• Start documenting your project as early as possible; don’t leave anything to the last minute before the Wiki Freeze. For a complete list of deadlines visit the iGEM 2013 calendar
• Have lots of fun!