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From 2013.igem.org

Sprout at Yale

This summer, Splash at Yale launched their first summer program: Sprout! Middle school and high school students were invited to campus take courses taught by Yale undergraduates and graduate students on virtually anything. Over the course of the four weeks in July, students had the chance to learn about subjects more in depth than in our day programs. Here is a link to the Sprout website

We decided to teach a class entitled "Synthetic Biology: Reprogramming Life." Our class description was: Come learn the science behind hijacking living organisms to perform all kinds of helpful processes faster and cheaper than ever before! Over the course of four weeks, an ongoing undergraduate research project will be used as the framework for this course.

We taught 16 High school students. We started teaching basic biology concepts to make sure everyone was on the same page. The second class was focused on the history of Genetic Engineering, and concluded with a extensive debate over the genetically modified salmon. The third class taught key biology lab techniques heat shock, electroporation, and o Artificial DNA synthesis. The final class was centered explaining MAGE and our presenting our project we had been working on all summer.

This is a link to a copy of the second class

Anonymous feedback from our students

"my favorite class/teachers in sprout. really enthusiastic and fun class. got me interested in synthetic biology."

"Interesting
Learned a lot
Always new and cutting edge information
Made me feel more interested in science and genetics/biomedical engineering"

When asked about their favorite thing about Sprout:
"I really liked my synthetic biology class. It got me interested in genetics and DNA."