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Through our kit the team wanted to express its sympathy to [http://www.biobuilder.org BioBuilder], because we all think it's an awesome site and because we just love it! Not only it is educative and useful tool but it also challenging and fun. Because we totally share this vision of synthetic biology, we wanted to collaborate with BioBuilder in order to make Swiss high school students aware of this awesome site. Indeed as a part of our "human practice" for the iGEM competition, we wanted to make this site a reference for high school students in Switzerland. Our vision is to suggest a kit assembling some basic synthetic biology fundamentals easy to perform in high schools and add some BioBuilder "material" to the kit for instance: links to their site, some [http://www.biobuilder.org/activities/ comics]and links to their [http://www.biobuilder.org/animations/ animations]. So we contacted Professor Nathalie H.Kuldell president of [http://biobuildereducationalfoundation.org Biobuilder Educational Foundation], in order to share with us some of Biobuilder’s awesome content.
Education that is challenging and fun is really at the heart of what we do- and it sounds like what you do too.
Natalie Kuldell: Instructor, MIT Department of Biological Engineering and president of Biobuilder educational foundation
All the team agrees that the iGEM competition can be resumed to teamwork, learning, friendship, proper lab practices, and most of all fun. Our goal is to emphasize what we think to be the four main cornerstones of the iGEM competition in one single kit containing four sections: “Education”, “safety”, “sharing” and “fun”. We had for ambitious objective to include these four aspects in one and single human practice project to have an impact on the student community of Switzerland. Of course we agree that shipping our kits wasn’t really easy foe safety reasons so we decided to create our kit, so it could be used in several events organized at our university. For instance highschool students visit day, our science bus that promotes science within our younger students and of course the women&Engineering day, the team organized.
Our team has translated all the material of our kit in the 3 national languages: German, French and Italian and in English. The kit is entirely designed by us and contains awesome educational material kindly provided by Biobuilder.
The kit contains:
-An introduction to synthetic biology written by the team and a glossary explaining the fundamental elements of synthetic biology; In order to introduce the students to the subject and to the iGEM competition. This document reflects the vision and the summer experience of the team regarding the iGEM competition. It will definitely motivate the students to participate to such an experience!
-Our team not only aims to introduce the students to synthetic biology but also wants to help the teachers by providing them educational protocols easy to perform, explaining clearly and in a fun way the fundaments of Synthetic biology. Therefore we provide a protocol divided in two parts a “teacher protocol” and a “Student” protocol. The teacher protocol is filled up with tips, youtube video links to show how to perform some steps of the protocol, and references to material supplies. The Student protocol is meant to guide the student with clear pictures of the protocol's steps taken by the team and small tips to help them through the experiment. We provide two protocols one courtesy of Biobuilder and one done by ourselves meant to transform competent E.Coli with our team’s plasmid. And last but not least a small summary of the expected results with and explanations.
-A fun mini safety multiple choice and an educational comic to remind the students that safety always goes along with good lab practices.
-Links to youtube videos courtesy of Biobuilder showing some important lab steps like how to perform a transformation. Biobuilder’s famous comic: Adventures in synthetic biology. Interesting links to Biobuilder forum in order to share their love for synthetic biology! There are also more comics regarding some synthetic biology fundamentals and links to the iGEM competition. We also provide stickers of biobuilder, igem and our project Taxi.Coli smart drug delivery as goodies!
References: [http://web.mit.edu/be/docs/Kuldell_N_Public-Engagement-with-Synthetic-Biology_Informal-Learning-Review_2013_121_pg14-17.pdf "Public Engagement with Synthetic Biology" informal learning review by Natalie Kuldel]
[http://web.mit.edu/be/people/kuldell.shtml who is Natalie Kuldell?]
