Team:UANL Mty-Mexico/Synthetic CIDEB

SynBio Tunnel at CIDEB Back to top

As member of the 2013 IGEM UANL team, we could notice that the diffusion of information about synthetic biology and iGEM in general is very important for people to understand, that including the work we participants do in this contest.

The basic idea of this activity was to show and explain the Syn Bio Tunnel to the students of CIDEB so they could understand as much as possible from the information presented to them; which consists of 10 modules all making reference to different areas of the project we are working on, for example DNA, Biobricks and security inside the laboratories. At the Saturday courses there were 20 groups with approximately 30 people each, all with students of different ages, starting at 5 years old up to 18 years old. The principle organized a schedule for us, in which she gave us specific time and date for each group to have the tour to the tunnel. We gave the tour to all the groups in 4 Saturdays.

After all the expositions where done, we realized we had received positive feedback from the students that visited the tunnel. During the expositions, a big number of students were really paying attention and were really interested in the topics we talked about. They actively participated by asking questions of things they found themselves curious about and gave ideas they came up with at the time. They also mentioned that the explanations were very simple and easy to understand. This also includes the activity we did after every explanation, which tries to settle the ideas and make them easier for the students to remember.

At the end, the activity results in a bigger interest of the visitors in synthetic biology and in the iGEM contest. Students show a good response to the idea of joining to the next-year team. Even the teachers who accompanied the groups were very interested in the information given.