Team:BroadRun-NorthernVA/Education&PublicOutreach

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Education and Community Outreach



1. EDUCATION

Starting our iGEM team was no easy feat. We overcame many obstacles from financing our team to a lack of interest amongst peers, perhaps stemming from a lack of understanding of the power of science and engineering to bring social good. Our age group lead very busy lives with many heavily involved in sports, volunteer work, working part-time, or just keeping up with school. Synthetic biology and iGEM were unknown within our school community. Our earliest efforts through multiple information meetings, direct appeals to science teachers, did not bring in the students we needed. Also, with competing interests for the summer, we ran into problems of retaining students to do lab research in the summer months. We persisted despite these problems, and eventually assembled our geographically diverse, but passionate team seeking to explore synthetic biology as a potential means to solve world problems. Given our own experience with the lack of understanding of synthetic biology in particular, and the application of science and engineering in general, in our community, we placed a high priority to educate and inspire students at our school and also at the feeder middle school. Here is what we did.



Planning: Our



Lab Safety: To negate



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    Product Safety

    Before

    There are several options to minimize risks to the environment:

    • Incorporate
    • Minimize
    • W
    • D
    • F