Technion Israel iGEM High School Team 2015

This year, we mentored a group of high school students who are participating in the 2015 iGEM High School track. This is the first year ever in which Israeli high school teams are participating in the iGEM competition.

In order to give the high school students an introduction to synthetic biology and genetic engineering, we put together an introductory course in order to teach them the basics. Following the introductory course, we helped the team with the brainstorming process for their project and helped them as mentors.

“When I started studying at Technion, I didn't really know what I was getting myself into with Biotechnology. I had no idea what that was or that it even involved genetic engineering of any kinds. As a high school student, I was never exposed to the idea of genetic engineering, much less the possibility of doing it on my own! We've all heard the cliche that children are the future, but high school students are right on the verge of having to make the important decision of which life pathway to follow, making it a critical time to get exposure to as many fields as possible, including synthetic biology. We went from seeing a group of high school student more interested in computer programming than listening to use, to seeing the team develop a complex and impressive genetic circuit.” - Yael

Naseeb Saida, one of the high school student who participated in our program, reviewed his experience:

“Taking part in iGEM and participating in such a great and incredible competition had given us a unique opportunity to work as real scientists and learning how to start a new whole idea from nothing, making it a new working system.

iGEM was a very challenging competition which demanded hard work from us trying to get the best results we can, At first it wasn't that easy to deal with the responsibility of learning many new things, to be able to start a new idea in a field that we knew nothing about. However, the Technion students' team was right next to us, helping us in many different ways, enabling us to skip the hard difficulties we faced in our first steps. Their presence next to us the whole way and each time we faced a difficulty has made our experience more interesting and enjoyable.

Thank you for your supporting. We appreciate that a lot. ”

Click here to see the Technion High School iGEM team's wiki.

Our lesson plans have been added on this page for future use with all iGEM teams. Feel free to use them to help spread the word about synthetic biology and iGEM to students around the world.