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Team:NTNU-Trondheim/Outreach
From 2013.igem.org
Our main human practices project is to participate in Researcher's Night, which is an event aimed at high school students. The goal of Researcher's Night is recruiting to the natural sciences by demonstrating (hands on experience and specialty lectures) that reserach is fun, to inspire them and motivate them to take higher education in science.
The NTNU iGEM team is participating in Researcher's Night with their own stand. This is the 9th year Researcher's Night is being hosted, and it has traditionally been very popular at NTNU. Last year, over 1200 students visited the arrangement. This year, Researchers' night was on the 27th of september, and we were invited to participate. We were really looking forward to it, since this is a unique opportunity to tell students about the possibilities of synthetic biology, and motivate them for a career in biotechnology. It seems that the students are looking forward to it as well, since this year's arrangement was fully booked in 10 minutes!
Link to norwegian Researcher's Night.
This year participating students can visit 30 something different stands, one of them is ours where we explain synthetic biology. To get the students to understand the concept of giving organisms new characteristic properties by putting together biobricks, we have borrowed last years NTNU-iGEM team's biobrick construction kit, including both DNA and restriction enzymes (a picture of the DNA from the construction kit is given below). We hope that this construction kit will make it easier both to understand why we are able to put together biobricks using certain combinations of restriction enzymes, and we also hope we can teach them what the different sequences that makes a gene are used for.
