Difference between revisions of "Team:Georgia State/Public Engagement/ASF"

D iscovery Day is ... Georgia State’s iGEM team participated in GSU Discovery Day, where we created an activity for young students to construct their own plasmid using different colored beads to make a bracelet. The different colored beads represented different features of a plasmid. Students constructed a plasmid that had a promoter, ribosomal binding site, coding sequence, and terminator. After constructing their plasmid, they transformed it by placing it into a cardboard cartoon E.coli. The E. coli then produced a protein (a jolly rancher) based on the coding sequence that the student chose. The students were able to learn how transformation works and the building blocks in a plasmid that result in a target protein.

E xploration Expo is ... The same construction of plasmid activity as the one done on Discovery Day was performed at the Atlanta Science Festival held at Piedmont Park. This event had a much larger audience with a wider age range. Young children and teens stopped by our booth to learn about transformation and protein production. We were able to interact with a diverse group of students and parents in not only English, but Spanish and Chinese as well. This was a fulfilling and successful outreach experience that GSU iGEM will participate in again in the future.