SynBio Challenge

This summer we collaborated with the Open Science School association (OSS) to organize a "mini-iGEM" competition between high-school students. Our goal was to increase high school student’s interest for science through the discovery of synthetic biology.

The Competition

The students were approached several months prior to the competition. They came from different schools and were between 16 and 20 years old. We talked to them about synthetic biology, about iGEM, and about our project this year.
Then the students who wanted to participate designed experiments that they wanted to do, and we opened our lab to them for 4 days, providing them material and feedback for their experiments.
At the end of the 4 days, each team of students presented their experiments and results, in front of high school students, the iGEM team, OSS, teachers, and professional researchers in life sciences.

After the presentations, the jury selected the best two students, who were welcome to join the iGEM Team Paris-Bettencourt during the summer for 4 weeks.

Open Science School

Open Science School is a young student association of the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research (CRI), founded by previous iGEMers, that aims at spreading science ideas with innovative means. Their objective is to give students the conceptual and material capacities to learn biology through research and lead their own project. It was founded by members of the iGEM Team Paris-Bettencourt 2014.