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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. Indeed Switzerland is very active in the Life Sciences field and biology is very popular within our high school students. However we were very 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. Therefore our team imagined two ways of interacting with the Swiss high school students:

-An educational kit containing four different sections: Education, safety, fun and sharing in order to introduce the students to the four main cornerstones of the iGEM community. -Since our team this year is exceptionally composed of ten young women we decided to take advantage of our particularity and create a Woman&Engineer day in our University. All high school Swiss female students were invited to participate to our special day. The Woman&Engineer 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. We even organized a small competition between the girls for the best synthetic biology project idea!

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.