Team Ashesi Ghana as part of our community engagement, embarked on a workshop in Synthetic Biology for students in the Berekuso township which is situated on the outskirts of Accra. The students that participated in the workshop comprised of 50 girls and 3 boys, all of whom are in the junior high school level. The main objective of this workshop was to introduce these young minds to synthetic biology and its intriguing applications in making the world a better place.
We thought this was a noble idea since for most of the children, growing up in a less developed community, deprived them of being well informed on the advancements and capabilities of technology such as synthetic biology in the transformation of our world today.
With the zeal to acquire knowledge and exposure to advancements in the world, these young kids were filled with excitement when we, members of Team_Ashesi_Ghana, brought the prospects of synthetic biology to their doorstep.
We began the workshop by teaching the children what synthetic biology is and how we intend to use it to solve the problems caused by illegal small-scale mining in the country. We then proceeded to teach the children about what DNA was and why it was important. We did this by using a lot of comical pictures and relatable items so that the children could easily understand what we were saying.
Because we knew that all of this information was new to the kids, we decided to make the activity a lot more interactive and exciting. Hence, we designed a simple and comprehensive protocol for Banana DNA extraction which served as the practical idea of the message we brought to their doorsteps.
