Team:Yale/Outreach

From 2013.igem.org

Latest revision as of 17:23, 30 August 2013

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Sprout at Yale

This summer, Splash at Yale launched their first summer program: Sprout! Middle school and high school students were invited to campus take courses taught by Yale undergraduates and graduate students on virtually anything. Over the course of the four weeks in July, students had the chance to learn about subjects more in depth than in our day programs. Here is a link to the Sprout website

We decided to teach a class entitled "Synthetic Biology: Reprogramming Life." Our class description was: Come learn the science behind hijacking living organisms to perform all kinds of helpful processes faster and cheaper than ever before! Over the course of four weeks, an ongoing undergraduate research project will be used as the framework for this course. We had 16 high school students in our class.

Week #1

We started teaching basic biology concepts to make sure everyone was on the same page. The class included letting the students extract the DNA from strawberries.

Week #2

The second class was focused on the history of genetic engineering, and concluded with a extensive debate over the genetically modified salmon.

• This is a link to a copy of the second class

Week #3

The third class taught key biology lab techniques heat shock, electroporation, and artificial DNA synthesis.

Week #4

The final class was centered explaining MAGE and our presenting our project we had been working on all summer.

Some anonymous feedback from our students

"my favorite class/teachers in sprout. really enthusiastic and fun class. got me interested in synthetic biology."

"Interesting
Learned a lot
Always new and cutting edge information
Made me feel more interested in science and genetics/biomedical engineering"

Awesome class! I really enjoyed learning and debating important topics in synthetic biology. Great job you guys and good luck at iGEM!

Very informative!

Thought class was interesting as well as amusing
Activities fun and well planned

Interesting class, I learned a surprising amount. Good luck in iGEM!

I thought the class was extremely interesting, and I loved the DNA extraction in the beginning. To be honest, when I had to do it for school, it didn't work as well as it did in the class.

Every single person who taught the class was amazing. The class was my favorite. I loved how you masterfully blended your project with an overview of syn bio. Amazing class!!! hope you win the competition.

When asked about their favorite thing about Sprout:
"I really liked my synthetic biology class. It got me interested in genetics and DNA."