Team:Manchester-Graz/Practices/Schools
School Visits
As a part of our public outreach we visited two Highschools in Austria, BRG Kepler in Graz and HLW Deutschlandsberg, to talk about Biotechnology, Synthetic Biology and our iGEM project.
To make sure the students (most of them 17 or 18 years old) knew what we were going to talk about we started our presentation with a short explanation of DNA, genes, transcription and translation followed by the principles of plasmids, cloning and their use for BioTech and SynBio. That theory was also illustrated by several examples of how those two research fields are a substantial part of our everyday life, even if we might not always be aware of it. Thereafter we took time to answer questions arising from our audience regarding that topics as well as biotechnology programs at university.
After all that talking the students got a chance to get their hands right onto the topic and isolated DNA from strawberries. The surprise was huge by the amount of slimy mass consisting of DNA and proteins they could isolate from a small amount of strawberry and even take their results home in micro centrifuge tubes.
For us it was quiet an experience to talk about Synthetic Biology in front of pupils since we were only used to discussing our results and scientific topics in front of fellow students or teachers. Especially explaining complex biological processes (such as transcription and translation) and methods (for example PCR) made it quit challenging for us, as we had to simplify our language to make sure pupils really understood what we were talking about.
