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Overview:
The human practice section of our project is a big challenge for our team. Indeed our idea is to reach out for young adults and high school students since they are the next iGEMers generation. Our aim is to introduce synthetic biology and the iGEM community to the high school students of Switzerland. Switzerland is very active in the Life Sciences field and biology is very popular within our high school students. However we were quite surprised to hear that most of them weren’t aware of iGEM’s competition.
Therefore we decided that our human practice project would be based on raising the awareness of the high school students as much as we could. Our feeling is that there is a lack of educational material promoting synthetic biology in a fun and pedagogical way in Switzerland. So our team imagined two ways of interacting with the Swiss high schools to share with us the amazing experience that is the iGEM competition.
-An educational kit with the help of Biobuilder containing four different sections: Education, safety, fun and sharing in order to introduce the students to what we think are the four main cornerstones of the iGEM community. The kit has been translated in four languages: German, English, French and Italian. The team had some precise objectives we wanted to fulfill:
-Introduce the Swiss high schools to synthetic biology and make them love it! The team provides a protocol that uses our team’s plasmid to transform competent E.coli and make them glow. We also provide a Biobuilder protocol: “What a colorful world to continue the good work and learn more about Biobuilder.”
-Help the teachers by providing them all the material and teaching material they’ll need to teach properly. For instance: a special teacher’s version of the protocol providing tips and links to useful references.
-Make the students participate and share their experience and thoughts with the synthetic biology community providing them links to forums and sites like BioBuilder and iGEM; so they can develop their knowledge further and share their love with more synthetic biology fans
-Introduce them to the biosafety and make them conscious about others and the environment using funny videos and comics courtesy of biobuilder.
-Make them have fun while learning providing them with comics, stickers, video links and forums.
-On the other hand, since our team this year is exceptionally composed of ten young women we decided to take advantage of our particularity and organize a Woman&Engineer day the 7th of October in our University. All high school Swiss female students from the French region of Switzerland were invited to participate to our special day in EPFL. The Woman&Engineer’s day is meant to promote carriers in bioengineering for woman and encourage them to work in the field. A big part of this day was dedicated to test our kit, visit our labs and talk about iGEM competition, synthetic biology and the Biobuilder foundation between girls. We even organized a small contest within teams of girls for the best synthetic biology project idea! The interaction with the students is going to be awesome! We are so looking forward!
After a summer of laughs, intense work, and amazing knowledge acquisition; working days and nights as a team, learning of our mistakes: We all agreed one could not find better iGEM ambassadors than us! Therefore our duty was to share this amazing experience with the ones that will be the next iGEMers!
