Team:Hong Kong HKU/schooltour

School Tour

With the helps from St. Paul’s Co-educational College and St. Stephen’s Girl’s College, we held 2 school tours in the early September.

We gave several lectures during the school tours, to introduce our iGEM team, basis of synthetic biology and also ethnical issues related to synthetic biology. As synthetic biology is still a new topic that students encounter, they were very active in asking follow-up questions and answering the questions we asked.

A strawberry DNA extraction workshop was also held in St. Stephen’s Girl’s College. Students were divided into groups and did the experiment in groups, teachers and our teammates guided them through the experiment and answer questions that students asked.

After the school tour in St. Stephen’s Girl’s College, we have an extended cooperation with the school and we are helping the school to design laboratory experiments and making a laboratory manual for them to have a better use of the laboratory resources in the school.


Junior Science Institute workshop

To further spread the ideas of genetic engineering to secondary school students, we cooperated with HKU Faculty of Science HKU to give a talk on synthetic biology to participants of related Junior Science Institute (JSI) workshop.

Each year, the Faculty of Science of HKU organizes 3 sets of JSI workshops, in which secondary schools students could have a taste of learning science in a university. In July, the HKU iGEM team gave a short talk to participants of the genetics workshop of JSI. On that day, experiments of investigating genetics through yeast were provided to the participants, with principles and theories explained in form of lectures. To help the participants understand the applications of genetics better, we gave a short talk on how genetic engineering is applied in everyday life. After the talk, participants reported that they have a deeper understanding towards synthetic biology, some even said that they would like to enter the field after they enter university!