Collaboration
US AFRL Carroll High School Meetup
In order to collaborate and exchange ideas with other iGEM teams, on June 22th, five of the team members - Ben, Lu, Marry, Nicholas, and Joy - went to Dayton, where an iGEM team meetup was held and four other teams joined (Ohio State University, United States Air Force Academy, Carroll High School and Alma College). At the beginning of the meeting, we introduced ourselves and played some games to get familiar with each other. After interacting with other teams, each team introduced their projects through presentations and shared confusion about the project. In addition to getting suggestions from other teams, we also skyped an expert of iGEM and discussed the expectation of the competition in the meeting.
This collaboration was very valuable as we were able to present on our project and get feedback and extra inspiration from the other teams. From these suggestions, we had a better idea of the scope of options available to us and were able to choose a more clear path for our project. The meetup also gave us the idea of implementing kill switches; we decided not to work with kill switches on our project for practical reasons, but it was a worthwhile exploration and discussion. Moreover, this experience helped us to get a better understanding of iGEM and aroused great interest in this competition.
Purdue iGEM Collaboration
We collaborated with Purdue's iGEM team by helping each other's wiki development. We were also able to assist them with coding for the wiki, providing them with strategies to make their wiki more flexible to device size. This included information on tools such as viewport units and media queries. We also aided them with troubleshooting in various instances. Purdue aided our wiki by pointing out errors that were not noticed by our team.
We visited Purdue during the summer to learn more about their project, their lab, and their research process. We also got to explain our project to their team. We are excited to see their project at the Jamboree!
Rice University iGEM Survey
We aided Rice University's iGEM in their survey by answering questions on how we came up with our topic for iGEM. They used this information in a meta-analysis to see if team location affected the project selection process.