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Our Goals

Our project is in the “Foundational Advance” track and similarly we wanted High School students to learn and investigate what Synth Bio was and where it is heading in the future. We believe to create is to learn so restarted the writing competition for High Schoolers start by last year’s iGEM team. We asked students to create a 1000 word piece answering the following question:

“Which advancement in synthetic biology do you think
is the most promising, and why?”

Out and About

University Open Days

Over the course of the year we volunteered at our Universities Open Days, spruiking both studying Science and participating in the Strange Nature writing competition. Talking to future science students about what is possible and what may soon be possible was incredibly insightful and seeing their interest in Synthetic Biology was wonderful.

Pictured above are Kya (left) and Callum (right) talking to prospective Science students about everything from Genetic Engineering to the best place for coffee on campus.

Science Week Volunteering

We also volunteered as part of the Australian Society for Microbiology during Science Week at their stall at the Australian Museum. There we were able to talk to hundreds of Primary (years K-6) and High Schoolers (years 7-12) to discuss Microbiology, Biotechnology and also find out what they knew about Synthetic Biology and genetic engineering. The displays really fascinated the kids and students, especially the fluorescent bacteria!

Contacting Teachers and Schools

We got in contact with many teachers and schools to promote the writing competition. We also wrote articles for Science Resource Newsletters sent to teachers to try and increase the awareness of our project.

Competition

Our competition was hosted on the Strange Nature website where we provided resources about what Synthetic Biology was, recent developments and future applications. The competition was open until the 1st October. We had a whole host of submissions from Dystopian future stories of genetically engineered super humans to {SOME GOOD ESSAY}. We had more essays submitted this year than previously and while the quality of submissions varied they were all incredibly insightful to what the students think about the possibilities of Synthetic Biology.

Short List

We currently have a short list of 6 pieces which we feel are well written, explore Synthetic Biology and show imagination in their responses. They are provided below