Team:Technion HS Israel/Practices

Technion 2015 HS Team's Wiki

Human Practices

Our human practice activities were inspired by our personal experiences. Each of us comes from a different background but we all can agree about the importance of intellectual horizon broadening. Many of us come from Israel’s northern periphery. The advanced and enriching learning opportunities for students here, are quite few. We all feel so incredibly fortunate to have had the chance to participate in iGEM. During the last year we were exposed to numerous scientific fields and lab procedures, which were highly advanced and used state of the art technology, we found them fascinating.

A few summers ago there was an uprising of social justice awareness in Israel. For many people it means that basic food products should have a reasonable price. For us it means satisfactory educational experience as well. Sharing the possibilities we witnessed had an immense significance for us.

These are some of the reasons we wanted to share our experiences with our fellow students. We wanted to show them that school is only the tip of the iceberg. We organized a few presentations in our schools and talked about our project and all the amazing possibilities after high school.

As mentioned previously we participate in extracurricular activities (the program of Future Scientists and Inventors) held at the pre-academic center in the Technion institute. During the summer we shared the building with many pre-elementary school children. They came for scientific summer activities. Although they may be young we thought showing them some synthetic biology could be a fun idea. It’s never too soon to fall in love with science.

At some point we found out that there’s another iGEM high school team in Israel. We talked to them and learnt that they were facing mathematical difficulties. That got us arranging a get together in which we got acquainted with each other and did our best to help them with their model issues. This meeting also reassured us that even though the competition is held in another country, we won’t be alone when we get there. That is something we are grateful for.

The struggle that the Danziger team went through with their model was not unfamiliar to us. Our answer to it was the modelling tutorial videos, on which we wrote on this page

Another problem we sought to address is the navigation through previous iGEM projects. We wrote about it here