Team:Yale/Outreach

From 2013.igem.org

Revision as of 00:45, 3 August 2013 by Jws67 (Talk | contribs)


Contents

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

337px-2013-07-06 23.34.39.jpg

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 had 16 high school students in our class.


Week #1

We started teaching basic biology concepts to make sure everyone was on the same page. The class included letting the students extract the DNA from strawberries.

800px-2013-07-06 15.03.54.jpg 1011498 677824222232329 1359232388 n.jpg 998354 677824245565660 45544250 n.jpg

Week #2

The second class was focused on the history of genetic engineering, and concluded with a extensive debate over the genetically modified salmon.

2013-07-13 15.21.04.jpg 2013-07-13 15.20.56.jpg

Week #3

The third class taught key biology lab techniques heat shock, electroporation, and artificial DNA synthesis. 1004097 10201562269597220 2072404503 n.jpg 28758 10201562262877052 686595857 n.jpg 1012208 10201562266117133 1166631094 n.jpg 1044980 10201562263437066 938404636 n.jpg



The final class was centered explaining MAGE and our presenting our project we had been working on all summer.

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."