Team:USyd-Australia/Template:Outreach

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Revision as of 00:07, 17 October 2014

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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 believe is 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 genetic engineering was wonderful.

Image[Kya or Callum talking to students][fluorescent bacteria]

Science Week Volunteering


We also volunteered as part of the Australian Society for Microbiology during Science Week at their stallat 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.

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 http://www.StrangeNature.com 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 have a short list of 5 pieces which we feel are well written, explore Synthetic Biology and show imagination in their responses.