Team:NTNU-Trondheim/Outreach

Researcher's Night

Our main human practices project is to participate in Researcher's Night, which is an evenet for high school students. The goal of Researcher's Night is to show the students that reserach is fun, to inspire them and motivate them to take higher education in science.

The NTNU iGEM team is participating in Researcher's Night, which is an event for high school students. This is the 9th year Researcher's Night is being hosted, and it has traditionally been very popular at NTNU. Last year, over 1200 students visited the arrangement. This year, Researchers' night was on the 27th of september, and we were invited to participate. We are really looking forward to it, since this is a unique opportunity to tell students about the possibilities of synthetic biology, and motivate them for a career in biotechnology. It seems that the students are looking forward to it as well, since this year's arrangement was fully booked in 10 minutes!

This year participating students can visit 30 something different stands, one of them being ours. To get the students to understand the concept of giving organisms new characteristic properties by putting together biobricks, we have borrowed last years biobrick construction kit, including both DNA and restriction enzymes (a picture of the DNA from the construction kit is given below). We hope that this construction kit will make it easier both to understand why we are able to put together biobricks using certain combinations of restriction enzymes, and we also hope we can teach them what the different sequences that makes a gene are used for.