Cornell Adult University Teen Program

Cornell Adult University (CAU) Teen Program offers youths a taste of what college life is like. Teens between 13 and 15 years old are led by counselors through a week of varied camp activities, field trips, and educational sessions. Once every week for three weeks, we taught a science sampler class to a group of about 20 students. We discussed the basics of synthetic biology and biotechnology, asked them of their thoughts about genetically modified organisms, and did fun science activities with them. One week we taught them how to extract DNA from a strawberry using simple household chemicals. The teens really enjoyed this activity and had a lot of fun playing with the gooey strawberry DNA.

ENGRD 1050

We have begun a series of presentations to students in introductory engineering seminars (ENGRG 1050) to introduce them to synthetic biology and how projects like ours can encompass all fields of engineering while providing comprehensive solutions to real-world problems.

Splash! at Cornell

Splash! at Cornell is a one-day educational program that offers secondary school students in the 7th-12th grades to take classes in any subject, taught entirely by undergraduate and graduate students. Founded by two of our iGEM team members, this program had its pilot event in Fall 2014 and invited over 75 students to campus for an innovative educational program in collaboration with the Cornell Public Service Center, the Cornell Institute for Biology Teachers, and the national non-profit Learning Unlimited. Several iGEM team members taught a course about the principles of synthetic biology, incorporating demonstrations, humor, and some information about our project this year. A very similar course at MIT Splash! several years ago was how our own team members found out about iGEM and synthetic biology and we are overjoyed to have had the opportunity to share this experience with students in the area.