Team:Chalmers-Gothenburg/NextGeneration
Next Generation
Lectures
Synthetic Biology is an extremely interesting field and as an iGEM Team we wanted to spread the word about it and hopefully inspire the younger generation of scientists to get more familiar with it.
In order to do so we held lectures and workshops for students in upper primary school, high school and first year university students. We gave them an insight into the principals of Cell Biology and we introduced them to what Biotechnology is, how it can be used and how it affects our everyday life.
When we had got their attention and made them hungry for more, we of course told them about the amazing iGEM competition, how it can create bridges between scientists and disciplines and how fun it can be. We also presented our project and how it is going to revolutionize the industry.
When they had all the new information about Synthetic Biology we put them to a test with a quiz, where they had to become more active and guess whether some GMOs we enlisted were indeed existing or only made up by us. This lead to a short discussion on truths and misconceptions about Genetic Engineering.
The final part of the workshop consisted of the students using their creativity and their freshly acquired knowledge about Synthetic Biology to come up with new organisms to engineer in order to create amazing new products.
They seemed to highly enjoy the workshop, which we definitely did as well. We hope that it has inspired some of them to pursue a path in science and to become a part of the iGEM community.