This year our team reached out to the community by helping to educate middle-and-high school aged girls on the tools used in synthetic biology. Not only does it help future scientists get involved at an early age, but it also helps promote gender diversity. We feel it is important to help educate the next generation of women in science by giving them the opportunity to work with DNA and the principals of synthetic biologyat a young age. So we decided to collaborate with the GISE, Girls In Science and Engineering, camp to teach them about synthetic biology.

GISE is a summer camped aimed at getting middle school aged girls involved with science. Our time with the middle schoolers and high schoolers not only allowed the girls to get a look into what studying science in college entails, it also gave our team members experience mentoring the girls, a win-win in the end. We provided the girls with the materials to extract DNA from strawberries and bananas, comparing the yield of DNA and making hypotheses as to what the cause of the yield difference was. The girls were also able to make neclaces out of their own DNA, following a cheek swab and DNA isolation.

We received oustanding feedback from the campers, many of whom were repeat campers from previous years. Some of the girls from the earliest years of the camp are prospective team members for next year's team and have attended our practice presentations for the conference in Boston. We feel that this in itself is a great sign that our work with the girls is spreading the word on synthetic biology and building interest in the team.