Team:Cooper Union/Practices
Human Practices
iGEM teams are unique and leading the field because they "go beyond the lab" to imagine their projects in a social/environmental context, to better understand issues that might influence the design and use of their technologies.
Teams work with students and advisors from the humanities and social sciences to explore topics concerning ethical, legal, social, economic, safety or security issues related to their work. Consideration of these Human Practices is crucial for building safe and sustainable projects that serve the public interest.
For more information, please see the Practices Hub.
Note
You must fill out this page in order to be considered for all awards for Human Practices:
- Human Practices silver medal criterion
- Human Practices gold medal criterion
- Best Integrated Human Practices award
- Best Education and Public Engagement award
Some Human Practices topic areas
- Philosophy
- Public Engagement / Dialogue
- Education
- Product Design
- Scale-Up and Deployment Issues
- Environmental Impact
- Ethics
- Safety
- Security
- Public Policy
- Law and Regulation
- Risk Assessment
What should we write about on this page?
On this page, you should write about the Human Practices topics you considered in your project, and document any special activities you did (such as visiting experts, talking to lawmakers, or doing public engagement).
Inspiration
Read what other teams have done:
Integrated Human Practices
Do you want to be considered for the Best Integrated Human Practices award? Make it easy for the judges to find any wiki content that is relevant to this prize. Highlight this content with a header or separate section.
Education and Public Engagement
Every year, the Cooper Union hosts a summer STEM program for high school students. Recently, this program started including a bioengineering section of high school students. Since they were working only a few rooms over from us, we saw this as an opportunity to share our project and findings with the community. So, we prepared a presentation for the high schoolers and allowed them to give us feedback and discuss our project. This was a valuable experience for both the STEM students and for our igem team. This presentation was useful for the STEM students because it gave them an idea of the type of work that is currently going on in biology research labs. It also showed them that the basic lab techniques they were learning could be applied to more advanced project ideas. We hope that this presentation sparked their interest and encouraged them to continue to pursue research projects in genetic engineering and biology. This outreach also proved to be beneficial to us. Preparing a presentation on our project helped us organize the various parts of the project and improve our public speaking skills. The student’s questions helped us realize what parts of the project need to be more carefully explained. This helped us improve our overall presentation while creating a memorable experience for both ourselves and the high school students.