Team:METU Turkey/hp-with-people.html

High school meetings

We do not restrict ourselves into METU or other teams. We want to share iGEM logic to younger people who lives in immediate surroundings. The best way of this is putting iGEM across young minds of high school students. So, we visited the high schools around us.

MEV High School and Umitkoy Anatolian High School

We went there and gave a seminar about iGEM competiton. Our main aim is sharing the logic behind the iGEM. Therefore, we basically tell the iGEM competition with project examples of not only college but also high school teams.Also, we tried to encourage them to set up a high school teams but were not that succesful, even though students are thrilled, mostly the administration of schools and teachers were sorry to decline due to lack of funds. A shame really...

Having the advantage of being located on our schools campus, we were thrilled when biology teachers from the OGV high school invited us to present ourselves to the kids.With this new gained fame we explained the general logic behind iGEM and told the kids about many of the projects including ours. After they took the bait, we infected the kids with the highschool division of iGEM :). The kids must have liked the idea because after the beginning of school an iGEM Student Club was formed by their Science and Technology teacher.

DNA day seminar

The Biology and Genetics Student Club (Biyogen) and our team joined forces to celebrate this special day! So we celebrated the DNA day with scientist candidates from OGV High school. In this seminar, we explained the structure and importance of DNA,  its history and recent applications related to the DNA based on synthetic biology and iGEM. This seminar helped them to improve the solutions to general problems via using synthetic biology. As we dwindled in areas not covered in high school level biology, the kids excitement arose. I don’t think that they will underestimate biology or DNA ever again :D.

Demo Experiments

The DNA day and our previous presentations must have been a great success because we were contacted again by the biology teacher of the OGV high school. This time, the kids wanted to see a lab, how things work in a lab and generally the Biological Sciences Building. So, we cleaned up the lab, gathered materials and showed the kids the bright side of a laboratory (no need to crush them with the dark sides right?)

OGV High school division help

We already mentioned the newly formed iGEM Student Club in OGV, so we were again summoned, this time to be more specific about iGEM. So we explained in more detail what iGEM was about and how it was done. As the kids and their teacher showed increased interest in joining iGEM we set up schedules for the therotical training of the kids. We are now trying to teach to the kids how a scientific paper should be read. I must add that the Brainstorming sessions of such young minds is pretty fascinating. We are still aiding these kids, to lectures never end.

Synbio and Children

We work as the scientific division of Guven Foundation which helps the children in social and scientific areas. We work as a bridge between synthetic biology and children. The children we are talking about had pretty hard conditions in life. We tried to influence the children by introducing them to science, especially biology and with that influence give them the courage and maybe a goal to accomplish. Seeing the faces of the kids after you explain even basic biology or let them play with colored solutions makes you believe in the motto change the World one child at a time .