Team:Hong Kong HKUST/human practice/outreach/isf academy

This year, we had the opportunity to cooperate with an international school in Hong Kong to introduce the idea of synthetic biology to high school students. We had roughly around 30 students from The Independent Schools Foundation Academy (shorten ISF Academy) visit our school. These were grade 10 students who will be determining their IB subjects in November. The school eagers to expose these students into various areas of studies to allow them explore their field of interest. Our team’s goal was to introduce students to synthetic biology as the newly emerging field of study in biology, hoping to give those potential future scientists some inspiration. We delivered a talk to the students introducing the basic concept behind synthetic biology as well as its application. We also managed to introduce iGEM and present this year’s project “Finding Pneumo”. We tried to explain the principle behind our construct, and it was pleasing to see students’ enthusiasm to learn. In fact, we were surprised how much they understood considering they are only grade 10 students in high school! After the talk, we invited students to visit our lab, giving them a snapshot of how a college biology lab looks like. Moreover, we prepared a few small lab activities such as ____ for them to have some hand on experience in wet lab. We emphasized that while the lab work can be fun, safety should be the first and far most important concern.

Fig 1 . Here is the potato.

Here is the description of the potato: it is a potato!

It was great to interact with these high school students. They all had potentials to be great scientists and researchers, and we are excited to think what this young future generation has to offer in the near future.