Team:DTU-Denmark/Public Engagement
Education and Engagement
Science EXPO
Science EXPO is the biggest science fair in Denmark, and the 2019 version of the event was held on the 28th, 29th, and 30th of April. Science EXPO serves as the grand finale of the Danish competition “Unge Forskere” where high school students create and present their own research project. In order to raise awareness around synthetic biology and its applications, we participated in Science EXPO as an external exhibitor, alongside some of the biggest science-based companies in Denmark. To explain synthetic biology, we displayed iGEM projects from previous years as well as some of the core concepts from this year’s project. Furthermore, we had pipettes, microbe plushies, and other lab things. The stand was visited by different audiences. Although a large part of the audience consisted of elementary school kids, and many of the visitors were primarily interested in trying the pipettes or the microscope, many were also interested in our project and the biological aspects behind it.
UNF Biotech Camp
UNF[1] Biotech Camp is for ambitious high school students who spend a week of their summer vacation receiving university-level teaching in several aspects of biotechnology, including experimental synthetic biology.
We as an iGEM team had early contact with the UNF biotech camp organizers since many of the teachers on the camp are former iGEM participants from DTU. We partnered with them to develop a new experimental protocol based on the laboratory exercise from the BioBrick Tutorial. We also provided lab space for the organizers and supplied them with some standard plasmids and strains to speed up the preparation work for the camp.
Furthermore, all of the Danish iGEM teams (SDU, UCopenhagen, and us), were invited to present our projects at the UNF biotech camp Juli 25th. The teams all made a 25-minute presentation about their project and the participants were engrossed in the three projects and had a lot of questions. This was a great way to get the participants interested in synthetic biology and give them a grasp of all the possibilities that synthetic biology has to offer.
Last but not least, this was a good experience for us as we got to practice the communication of our project and how to shape the presentation in a way so that it is understandable for everyone.
Biotech Academy Camp 2019
Every year in the autumn break, the DTU-based non-profit student organization Biotech Academy hosts a camp for 24 high school students with an interest in biotechnology. Together with the iGEM team UCopenhagen, we were invited to talk about iGEM and our project.
Additionally, we discussed what iGEM was and how it can impact the world.
This year’s theme on the camp was filamentous fungi, lining up nicely with our project and the participants were very interested in the project as well as iGEM.
High school visits
Following in the footsteps of last year’s DTU iGEM team, we decided to spread the word of iGEM and our project as well as raise awareness and interest of biotechnology and synthetic biology by teaching high school students.
Therefore, the team visited two high schools (Bagsværd Kostskole and Gymnasium and Birkerød Gymnasium) to talk about our project and iGEM as well as host a workshop. The workshop was inspired by the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and we discussed how iGEM projects can contribute to reaching the goals.
Through the presentation and workshop, we presented our project and previous projects as well as three specific SDGs and discussed how iGEM projects can impact the world.
Hereafter, the students were asked to find their own solutions to the SDG’s.
This part of the workshop was made in collaboration with the Washington iGEM team as they have made a booklet with a wide range of activities and inspirations from previous iGEM projects. The booklet shows how an iGEM project may be able to solve local and global problems. The collaboration can be found here.
After discussing the students’ ideas in plenum, we taught them how to implement synthetic biology in their solutions. Basic techniques, such as 3A assembly, Golden Gate assembly, Gibson assembly, and CRISPR/Cas9 were covered and the students were asked to consider how these techniques could be used to realize their solution.
Through giving these presentations, we found that the students were capable of implementing techniques from synthetic biology into projects that could contribute to attaining the SDG’s, and in doing so, they surprised even their teachers with how resourceful they could be when presented with an interesting problem position. Furthermore, we gained a lot of experience on how to present complicated issues to students of different academic levels, whilst inspiring them to invent their own solutions.
We hope that this will inspire some of the students to think about what we can do with biotechnology and perhaps even pursue a career as scientists or engineers and thereby be a part of improving the world around us.
(1) Ungdommens Naturvidenskabelige Forening, Youth’s science association
