Bronze Medal:

Register the team, have a great summer, and have fun attending the Giant Jamboree.

Create and share a description of the team's project via the iGEM wiki.

Present a Poster and Talk at the Giant Jamboree.

Develop and make available via The Registry of Software Tools, an open source software tool that supports Synthetic Biology based on Standard Parts.

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Silver Medal:

Demonstrate the relevance of your development for Synthetic Biology based on standard Parts.

Provide a comprehensive and well-designed User Guide. (Be creative! An instructional video may work as well.)

Provide detailed API documentation, preferably, automatically built from source code documentation (use tools like doxygen, yard, rdoc, naturaldocs, etc).

Demonstrate that you followed best practises in software development so that other developers can modify, use and reuse your code. Provide more than one realistic test case. Examples of best practices are automated unit testing and documentation of test coverage, bug tracking facilities, documentation of releases and changes between releases.

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Gold Medal:

Provide a convincing validation, testing the performance of the development -- experimentally (can be outsourced) or by other teams and users. Note, even if the algorithm or tool turns out not to work that well, the Gold requirement is fulfilled if the test is good and the analysis convincing. Validation may include: preferably experiments, informatics analysis (complexity, run time) of an algorithm, or user studies.

Make your software interact / interface with the Registry.

Re-use and further develop previous iGEM software projects (or parts thereof) or use and/or improvement of existing synthetic biology tools or frameworks.

Develop a well documented library or API for other developers (rather than only a stand-alone app for end users.)

Support and use the SBOL and / or SBOLv standard.

iGEM projects involve important questions beyond the bench, for example relating to (but not limited to) ethics, sustainability, social justice, safety, security, or intellectual property rights. Describe an approach that your team used to address at least one of these questions. Evaluate your approach, including whether it allowed you to answer your question(s), how it influenced the team's scientific project, and how it might be adapted for others to use (within and beyond iGEM). We encourage thoughtful and creative approaches, and those that draw on past Policy & Practice (formerly Human Practices) activities.