Difference between revisions of "Team:DTU-Denmark/Public Engagement"
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<h2>Biotech Academy Camp 2019</h2> | <h2>Biotech Academy Camp 2019</h2> | ||
| − | <p> | + | <p> Every year in the autumn break, the non-profit student organization Biotech Academy hosts a camp for 24 high school students with an interest in biotechnology. Together with the iGEM team from the University of Copenhagen, we were invited to talk about iGEM and our project. <br> |
Additionally, we discussed what iGEM was and how it can impact the world.<br> | Additionally, we discussed what iGEM was and how it can impact the world.<br> | ||
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! | 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! | ||
Revision as of 09:53, 18 October 2019
Education and Engagement
Science Expo
The science expo was held the 28th, 29th, and 30th of April and is part of the Danish “Unge Forskere” competition where student from high school creates and present their own research project. We were represented by a stand with pipettes, microbe plushies, and other lab things, we were also showing of projects from previous years and concepts from this year’s project.
The stand was visited by a lot of different audiences mostly wanting to try using the pipettes and the microscope, and of course hold and cuddle our giant microbe plushies. This was mainly due to the fact that our audience, mainly consisted of elementary school kids and their teachers. We also had some really nice and informative talks on what microorganisms are and that they can be used for.
This talk was facilitated by us having the plushies since most kids found them really cute.
UNF Biotech Camp
All of the Danish iGEM teams (SDU, KU, and us), were invited to come and do a talk on our projects at the UNF biotech camp Thursday the 27th of Juli. UNF biotech camp is a camp for ambitious high school students who spend a week of their summer break having university level teaching in biotechnology.
All three teams from Denmark were represented and we all made a presentation of 25 minutes. The participants were really excited about the three projects and had a lot of questions, many of them being “how can I get to do this”. This was a great way to get the young participants hyped on synthetic biology, and a great way for them to get a grasp of all the possibilities that synthetic biology has.
Last but not least this was good practice for us in practicing the communication part 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 non-profit student organization Biotech Academy hosts a camp for 24 high school students with an interest in biotechnology. Together with the iGEM team from the University of Copenhagen, 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 in biotechnology and synthetic biology.
Therefore, Helena, Jacob, Marcus, and Louise visited two high schools 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 three specific SDGs, our project as well as previous iGEM projects, and discussed how the iGEM projects can impact the world.
Hereafter, the students were asked to come up with 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 and 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 CRISPER/cas9 was covered and the students were asked to consider if these techniques could be used to realize their solution.
Through giving these presentations we found that the students were able to implement 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 come up with their own solutions.Society is going to need more scientists and engineers that will improve the world around us and we can aid in making this happen by providing inspiration and guidance.
