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Revision as of 03:03, 19 September 2015
Collaborative Learning
"Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much." - Helen Keller
A hallmark of this year’s iGEM experience has been fostering interest in young scientists and helping grow another generation of iGEMers. We had the opportunity of working with students from Austin ISD’s Liberal Arts and Science Academy (LASA), a team of 15 motivated high school scientists, also competing in this fall’s International Genetically Engineered Machine Competition LASATX Collaboration. The LASA team is working on carbon monoxide-sensing mechanism in bacteria that emits a wintergreen fragrance when carbon monoxide is detected. We believe that promoting STEM education and banding together can foster creativity, commitment, and collaboration. Specifically, the students has weekly meetings with our research educator, Dr. Dennis Mishler, and had open dialogue with our iGEM team on the Registry, BioBrick assembly, and synthetic biology. Through meetings, tours of our lab, and breaking down scientific literature, we were able to communicate our knowledge to the LASA team so they can start building their own iGEM project. In the Spring, they assisted us in creating fluorescent bacteria for our “painting with E. coli” booth at Austin’s premier SXSW Create conference. We worked with them during our SXSW Outreach in which we painted with bacteria that contained genetic devices (biobricks) that we created as part of our Breaking is Bad project and which were submitted to the registry. They also helped us run the booth, engage local participants, and start verbal surveys on public opinions and misconceptions on the benefits and advance in synthetic biology. Additionally, they helped test our newly created plasmids for the caffeine study by growing the different strains we had engineered. We also helped them in creating biobricks to submit to the registry and they helped demonstrate the utility of our redesigned pDCAF plasmids.
