Team:NTU-Taida/Human practice/Symposium

Workshop for High School Students

We have devised a workshop for senior high school students to introduce them to the fantastic world of synthetic biology. We first introduce the history and development of iGEM competition, and then give them the basic concept of synthetic biology as well as system biology. It is really hard to explain all of the subject in a short period of time, but we try to keep it simple and connect all those crazy ideas with our daily lives. We also encourage the participants to join in iGEM high school competition and many of the students show great enthusiasm toward this event!

After this broad introduction, we show them how to design a circuit and our project. We teach them the positive feedback, negative feedback, oscillator and other useful circuits, followed by their practical use in our team’s module. This section has cooked up a storm! The participants are very interested in our project and how we manipulate those microorganism to cater to our purpose.

After our presentation, we set up a story that some aliens have invaded the earth and that we wish them to find out those fierce invaders and destroy them based on the knowledge we just taught them. The practice was such a success. All the students did some brainstorming and try to explain to other teams about their design.

Although some circuit might seem to be a bit bizarre, yet they are imaginative and reasonably workable. We have also learned a lot from the experience. We hope the participants enjoyed it as much as we did!