Team:UFSCar-Brasil/educacional.html
Policy & Practices
How UFSCar-Brasil managed to raise funds
Fundraising
We introduce to you i&GEM bacteria!! The official mascots of the team who helped collect donations and give visibility to our team throughout the SBPC event.
The proposal of developing a class about Synthetic Biology in high schools encountered problems and challenges that made it impossible to be accomplished.
The scientific event: the Brazilian Society for the Advancement of Science (Sociedade Brasileira para o avanço da ciência – SBPC), the largest in Latin America, took place between July 12th-18th of 2015, in the Federal University of São Carlos’ campus with the main theme "Light, Science and Action", a reference to the international year of light, and inclueded more than 10 thousand people daily roaming around the event’s activities.
It was in this context that we gave life to our mascots, which walked through the event’s facilities provoking curiousity not only the children, but also in the adults who struggled to figure out the meaning of the costumes. By the way, many of them figured it out! However, others guessed things like carrots and cacti...
These are the discussions to be had with high school students: to present the alternatives offered by universities and to attempt bringing them closer to the high schools. The problems caused by dengue fever in our city in 2015 would also be debated at schools, with the development of a record on the disease’s rate between the students.
However, the school’s approach about the possibility of this activity wasn’t very receptive, offering little time for its execution, with little participation from the students. Hence this fact, since the activity wouldn’t happen as idealized, the team decided to put it aside and invest the time in other promising activities. We’ve sought to promote synthetic biology and the bug-shoo in congresses and workshops, with wide participation of students from diverse educational levels.
This intervention gave us a happy opportunity to unite members of our Team. Seeing the smiling faces of the children and their curiosity for our bacteria costumes really inspired UFSCar-Brasil!
Seminar Cycles
For an extended period in the first and second semester of 2015, our team offered weekly seminar cycles to the academic community, which aimed to increase the participants’ knowledge about the iGEM competition and synthetic biology as a whole. With this activity we sought to instruct the essential characteristics of Synthetic biology. This activity is the basis of the project’s development, and also enables the public to know more about the team and the competition’s organization, giving it more public visibility and increasing interest in future participations.
The lectures’ themes were published weekly on our Facebook page, in a way that many people could see and, depending on their interest, attend the lectures. There was a lot of interest from biotecnology students, especially freshmen, showing the biggest interest in new knowledge areas like Synthetic biology.
In the first lecture, entitled "drawing life - Building the next biological revolution", we sought to introduce the main concepts of molecular biology applied to synthetic biology projects and also a simple comparison between electric circuits and biological ones that influenced the developing of synthetic DNA manipulation technic.
In another moment, we discussed the topic, "research and innovation - The power of Syntethic Biology", which presented the history, methods and research that have already been developed and also the immense and innovative potentiality of synthetic biology.
The lecture "Biobrick standard and Assembly method", as its name suggests, showed the characteristics behind the biobrick concepts and the applications of Assembly methods.
The objective being to increase the perceptions of the application of synthetic biology, we prepared the lecture "Resuscitation of ancestral genes - Applications of syntethic biology", where we explained molecular evolution, techniques involved in ancestral genes discovery, motivation behind that kind of research and how synthetic organism manipulation machinery is used like a tool for new research and discoveries in that area.
Furthermore, the development and application of synthetic biology biosecurity aspects were also addressed in a lecture "Biosecurity and Syntethic Biology: risks and challenges", and the modelling tool was emphasized in the lectures ", “Less is more – Coco Chanel” and “Mathematics – A biological tool”.
In addition to characteristics of synthetic DNA manipulation techniques, we also sought to explain our own project, which was in development, in the lecture “2015 project” and “BUG-SHOO: From lab to society – Results and Perspectives”. In the lecture “iGEM: The competition”, we Included an overview about its history, participating countries in the competition, the Brazilian participation, the objectives and covered areas, tips to start a new project, teams related to iGEM and also all the requests to reach every medal.
To highlight the human practices aspect and the significance of social and educational application required by the competition, we presented the lecture "Improving the education and human practices with Syntethic Biology", which exposed how synthetic biology, the iGEM competition and science itself are linked to societal problems.
SBPC Jovem
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