Team:Heidelberg/Education

Education
Shaping the Next Generation of Scientists


Tobias´ Internship at the iGEM lab

The High School Research Lab Ortenau is a place for young scientists to get in touch with biological research and to gain wet-lab experience. We decided to closely collaborate with the High School Research lab during the 2017 iGEM season. The Research Lab Ortenau aims at arousing the student’s interest for biology. Mentoring the High School students meant great responsibility for us, and provided the opportunity to be involved even more in the synthetic biology community. We even intensified the collaboration, when Tobias Stadelmann, a high school student from the Research Lab Ortenau, asked whether it would be possible to work in our iGEM lab for a two-week internship. In the High School Research Lab Tobias is working on a project based on DNAzmes. During the time in our iGEM lab, Tobias was involved in our experiments to simplify PACE and to establish PREDCEL for directed evolution approaches. We are sure that all of us, Tobias, the High School Research Lab Ortenau, and the iGEM team gained profit from this collaboration. We are confident, that Tobias can apply the newly learned techniques to his DNazymes project and that he can transfer the know-how to other projects in the High School Research Lab Ortenau.

Course on Responsible Genetic Engineering in our Lab

Arousing the interest of High School students for science is a major aim we pursued during our Eduction activites. Besides the iGEM Seminar we gave at a local high school we received a request from a high school from Berlin. They were highly interested in visiting our lab for gaining some practical experience and getting insights into the research on directed evolution we perform in our lab. We hosted this high school class for a course on responsible genetic engineering in our lab. First we gave a short lecture on evolution, gene technology and introduced the theoretical background of our project to the class. We asked them to fill in our Survey for High School Students and they answered our questions with great passion. After they have gained enough theoretical knowledge about the experiments we perform in our lab, the attended a safety instruction held by our PI Dominik Niopek. They learned how to behave in a risk group 1 laboratory like our iGEM lab, for example that everyone needs to wear a lab coat and gloves, that food and drinks are forbidden as well as more general safety and hygiene measures like how to wash one´s hands.
The feedback we received was althrough positive and they left our iGEM lab with new experiences and a general impression on about every day live of scientists in the field of Synthetic Biology.
Educating Responsible Future Scientits
Educating high school students also comprises stimulating them to being reflective, responsible and communicating their personal opinions. Therefore, we created a survey for high school students that serves as a starting point for the aforementioned points. Here you find the results of our questionnaire filled in during the responsible genetic engineering course in our lab.

iGEM Seminar at a local High School

Arousing the interest of High School students for science is a major aim we pursued during our Eduction activites. Besides the iGEM Seminar we gave at a local high school we received a request from a high school from Berlin. They were highly interested in visiting our lab for gaining some practical experience and getting insights into the research on directed evolution we perform in our lab. We hosted this high school class for a course on responsible genetic engineering in our lab. First we gave a short lecture on evolution, gene technology and introduced the theoretical background of our project to the class. We asked them to fill in our Survey for High School Students and they answered our questions with great passion. After they have gained enough theoretical knowledge about the experiments we perform in our lab, the attended a safety instruction held by our PI Dominik Niopek. They learned how to behave in a risk group 1 laboratory like our iGEM lab, for example that everyone needs to wear a lab coat and gloves, that food and drinks are forbidden as well as more general safety and hygiene measures like how to wash one´s hands.
The feedback we received was althrough positive and they left our iGEM lab with new experiences and a general impression on about every day live of scientists in the field of Synthetic Biology.

Educating Responsible Future Scientits
Educating high school students also comprises stimulating them to being reflective, responsible and communicating their personal opinions. Therefore, we created a survey for high school students that serves as a starting point for the aforementioned points. Here you find the results of our questionnaire filled in during our iGEM seminar at a local high school.

Explanatory and Educative Video about our Project

Communicating science in a simple and easy understandable way is quite important, as we learned during our Human Practice activity. Here you can watch the video we created to make our project accessible to everyone and even non-scientists can get an impression on the research we performed during the this year´s iGEM season.