What we want

Getting to know "What is DNA?" or "DNA is surprisingly familiar to us" . In our view, these activities will help citizens to understand what synthetic biology is.

Contents

• DNA extraction from a banana

Visitors' Comments

• I understood that the double strand is not visible to the naked eye.
• It was an interesting experiment, it's like cooking!

What we want

While experiment waiting time, we educated people to become familiar with synthetic biology and iGEM.

Contents

1. About DNA
2. About gene recombination
3. About iGEM
4. About our project of last year with poster.

Visitors' comment

• I'm glad to know about DNA in detail by this lecture.

Teammates' comment

• By this activity, we knew an important fact. It was difficult for us to lecture about DNA or gene recombination without using technical terms. We assumed that it is natural to use them because we knew biology. However, for citizens who are not familiar with biology, it is the extraordinary. Therefore, we thought that introducing our field was as important as doing some experiments. Citizen still have a bias against gene recombination, which we are doing right now.
• Through this workshop experience, we learned that gaining correct knowledge and discussion would help citizens to become familiar with gene recombination. We would like to continue these activities, hoping that someday, citizen would have correct knowledge about synthetic biology and discuss more about our field.

We organized workshops at two high schools（Ritsumeikan high school & Sapporo Kaisei high school）; to educate about DNA and to introduce to them about iGEM.

What me want

Through the presentation, we wanted to generalize iGEM and encourage high school students to participate in iGEM competition.

Contents

1. Lecture about DNA and how we design genes.
2. Presentation about iGEM.

Students' comment

• It was a very interesting presentation.
• It was very instructive because I didn't know synthetic biology.

What we want

We wanted to educate the broad usability of gene recombination; through imagining and discussion about new bio-devices.

Contents

We categorizing the new bio-devices which high school students imagined and discussed those possibility.

Students' comment

• It was surprising that even students could imagine bio-devices which help people. I wished there should be devices that were applicable to study of biology.

Lots of fun!