Team:DTU-Denmark/Achievements/Policy and Practices

Introduction

Introduction documentary

Workshop

In accordance with our outreach strategy we developed and held a workshop in cooperation with Academy for Talented Youth. Academy for Talented Youth (ATY) is an initiative for ambitious and talented danish high school students, primarily interested in science, willing to extend their education beyond the ordinary high school lessons.

The focus of the workshop was to inspire the students rather than providing dry facts and heavy information. The idea was to make them aware of the huge potential within synthetic biology, including how synthetic biology can provide solutions to several current global problems.

We initiated the workshop with an introduction to the iGEM competition, synthetic biology and examples on innovative synthetic biology projects partly inspired by previous iGEM projects. The introductory presentations were followed by an idea development exercise, where the students were to pair a global problem with an element from synthetic biology. Prior to the workshop a list of global problems within different categories such as human health, climate and environment and the future increase in population was created along with a list of elements often applied in synthetic biology such as different proteins, organisms and reporters together with a definition of the individual elements. These lists provided the foundation for the first exercise. During the exercise the students were encouraged to add to the lists and to use their knowledge and imagination in order to pair up the problems with solutions.

Some of the examples the students came up with are listed below:

• Lotion containing lipases against obesity
• Bacteria emitting light when oxygen level decrease in lakes due to pollution
• Remedy against loss of hair, hair producing bacteria

Documentary

ESOF Reach and discover