Team:Sheffield/outreach

From 2014.igem.org

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Revision as of 23:08, 16 October 2014






Another aspect of our policy and practice project entailed outreach within schools to educate the next generation of scientists about synthetic biology. As this is an emerging science, these are the individuals who will be pioneering the technology and so we believed they would be the perfect target audience for our session. We carried out the outreach sessions in Porto, Portugal and Manchester, England.

Introduction

15:00 - 15:05

We introduced ourselves and what we do to the students.

Synthetic biology presentation

15:05 - 15:25

Our presentation consisted of:
• What is synthetic biology?
• How the BioBrick registry works
• Examples of previous iGEM projects

Group work activity

15:25 - 15:35

We asked the students to divide into groups of 3/4 to brainstorm about problems they would solve with synthetic biology.

Feedback

15:35 - 15:40

One member of each group explained the ideas they had discussed back to the class.

"Fatberglars" presentation

15:40 - 15:55

We gave a presentation of our project to the students, consisting of:
• The problems caused by fatbergs
• How we are solving this problem
• The social/ethical ideas we considered in our project

Q&A session

15:55 - 16:00

We answered questions posed to us by the students.





Our introductory presentation aimed to inform the students about what synthetic biology actually is. We provided a basic overview of how bacteria could be transformed to provide useful products, how the BioBrick registry worked, and how synthetic biology can be used to create novel solutions that could be used by communities all over the world. The students were then given an outline of what the iGEM competition is, why it exists and why they should participate in future.
Our introductory presentation aimed to inform the students about what synthetic biology actually is. We provided a basic overview of how bacteria could be transformed to provide useful products, how the BioBrick registry worked, and how synthetic biology can be used to create novel solutions that could be used by communities all over the world. The students were then given an outline of what the iGEM competition is, why it exists and why they should participate in future.
After our presentation the students divided themselves into small groups of 3 or 4 and were asked to imagine they were part of an iGEM team. We asked them to think the sort of difficulties they would choose to tackle, how they would solve this problem biologically and how they would take into account the ethical or social impact their project may face.
After 10 minutes of discussion one member of the group was asked to report back to the class. A wide variety of responses were received, and the students were particularly enthusiastic about using synthetic biology for medical purposes and to solve their own practical problems.
In the final section of the workshop we presented our project to the students. We explained how fats, oils and greases can lead to blockages in drainage and sewerage systems, and how we intended to solve this using lipase and keratinase. We explained our product to the students and gave an overview of all the different social and ethical ideas we explored during our iGEM project.
At the end of the session students asked many questions and were offered a cake.

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